Yeah, well, as far as I am concerned, they pretty much failed on the other bits. You not hearing many complaints about it any more is probably because most of us have stopped mentioning it (outside of discussions specifically about it), because nobody gave a shit then either, any more than you do now.
Of course a lot of applications later "embraced" Ribbon without all that preparation, and to be quite honest, I don't hear much complaints about Ribbon in Office - outside of nostalgia it's rare.