I completely agree with lot of your sentiments Scott. Unfortunately, I looked down the article hoping to spot specific references. For instance, I feel as though the new glass dock certainly fits the criteria you mentioned above about having a new style, but I would also say that it is unusable on a fairly objective level. The reflection that the Dock affords of surrounding windows only adds noise to what should be a simple process -- opening a document or application. If that wasn't enough, the glowing dots underneath running applications have had to be pointed out by me to people seeing Leopard for the first time -- these people didn't even know they were there and had to squint before saying "yeah, I guess I see those...". I find it hard to take the new dock's changes as "subjective". To me, it isn't "Oh, I don't like that." it's "Oh, wow, that's really hard to see."

I could go on about the other very objective changes in Leopard, but I'll just refer to Rory Prior's fantastic post about it: http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/blog/2007/10/leopard-stupidity.html.