Yeah I find this kind of hard to use as well. I initially thought it was some kind of live feed, but it seems it's just based on mouse movement, not news updates, so it's confusing why things are rearranging themselves and why. It probably doesn't help that I have a somewhat bad home internet connection, so sometimes stuff will expand a second or two after my mouse has already moved on somewhere else.

Bad bad bad for me.

But I notice anything in my environment that changes.

Hmmm ... will users feel like they are in less control of it? That would be generally bad, I would think. Then again, Google is big on empirical testing so maybe most people like this or accept it or whatever.

Do you know if they lab test pre-release?

With the amount of traffic their apps receive it would be quick and easy to achieve statistically meaningful data with a simple A/B test on a release.

I personally hate any animation in a UI unless it appears as a direct consequence of my actions.

Given how notorious they are for not wanting to deal with people directly I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't....