After a couple days using iOS 7 on the iPad, I think it's a bit more than a "new coat of paint." The underlying system seems to be a bit more refined. Battery life appears to be at least as good, if not better, than iOS 6, after it finished doing whatever it was doing in the first 24 hours that appeared to be causing increased battery drain.
I'm not sure what folks were expecting as far as "wow" factor, especially with a well-established OS. Apple typically does "wow" through new product releases rather than refinements to existing products. Adding features for the sake of it isn't innovation, it's the same old numbers game (as with screen size). Folks tend to buy the bigger numbers even if those numbers have no material impact on their workflows. Since Jobs died, Apple hasn't done anything with a "wow" factor, and they're now being run by a bunch of MBAs, or at least one, who doesn't strike me as a risk-taker. They still have a superior system to the competition, but I think they need to start moving the ball forward a bit more.
Icon spacing doesn't seem to be any different than before, except in folders. "Cramming" everything onto a page isn't a very elegant nor efficient solution, but neither is having text buttons without any definition to them.
The app switching is a huge improvement, especially when closing apps. You can now swipe up on multiple windows at once to close the apps, and the "tap and hold" delay is gone. In my experience, switching between apps is also way more efficient with the larger windows. I'll accept that perhaps the windows could be incrementally smaller to fit more of them on the screen, but if you're still looking at icons, you're doing it wrong. I'm not sure how well this works on the iPhone, though, so maybe it's worse on the smaller format.
The Control Center is a welcomed improvement.
The new Notification Center doesn't seem quite as functional as it should be; for example, there appears to be no way to launch the calendar by tapping in the Notification Center, and the event notifications (especially for the following day) are pretty useless. The weather information is borderline useless. I don't know how it behaves with other app notifications, but it seems as though the old way might have been better.
The Photos app is changed, I'm not sure for the better. It seems as though it requires more effort to do the same tasks, but I don't spend much time in Photos.
Overall, it's about what I expected. It's probably been more stable than I expected, but since it's evolutionary and seems to have had a decent beta run, I'm not too surprised.
JKG
