@ Zelig:
No kitchen table psychology please, claiming you know exactly what's wrong with anyone who holds a different opinion from you isn't very productive... and you make enough interesting points that I'd rather have a reasonable discussion than engage in rhetorics and mudslinging.
If people mean unfamiliar when they complain about something being unintuitive, they are best ignored. Same as people who can't tell the difference between "that's good" and "I like that". In both cases, there is a difference.
Pinch-to-zoom isn't a rare exception of inherently intuitive design, it's just one of the more obvious examples of matching the right input to the right action . Intuitive UI design often boils down to being consistent with the interface metaphor.
Example: Skeuomorphy wins some points initially because it's giving off clear visual clues... but then loses some because the interface doesn't deliver on its promises (without becoming excessively quaint - i.e. you can't just turn pages in a book, you can rip them off, make dog ears and so on).
In OSX, it matches the input style (drag&drop heavy, close to physical manipulation, avoiding computery gimmicks like tiling/snapping) and is a legitimate choice... even if I don't care for it.
In something abstract and sharp (e.g. copious use of tiling, optimised for vi-like input) it would be terrible.
In many new Windows applications, familiarity is the only thing that keeps [EDIT: the interface] from sucking hard... or more accurately, keeping people from realising that it sucks.
For reference, take the first image in the wikipedia entry of Visual Studio 2012. That tab-like header barely recognisable as such? People accept it because they got used to something similar in an aesthetic where it made sense. The drop-down menu? Without an effect in the header there's nothing to reinforce its position or coherence and it looks dropped somewhere haphazardly. The scrollbars? Nothing functionally wrong, but a relic from the past that doesn't fit in.
The whole thing desperately needs some cues, if not with gradients and shadows then something else (colour maybe). All of those are worse than the shouting.
This is not a fresh new interface carefully made to new design guidelines. Someone took a Vista-era interface, brutally squished it flat and called it a day.
*
@ recent discussion at large:
How interfaces look, and to a large extent how things behave, is technically shallow. In many ways some ancient interfaces beat what's common today because those shallow but oh-so-important bits can be modified without much difficulty.
