His problem is that he has to go through a lot more effort because under FF2, etc., he only had to type a few letters from the beginning of the URL in order to get where he was going.

This is still the case: typing in 'news.' will be recognized as a URL, and only subdomains of 'news' will be matched.

No it's not, it searches entire URLs, names, etc. So site.com/news will come up as well. I found the "awesome bar" entirely un-awesome as well.

No, it won't with the trailing '.' -- try it yourself, visit site.com/news and then search for 'news.'

But then you have to have the full domain, which is shitty. Defeats the purpose of having it search at all.