I wasn’t even on a Mac at the time but I was highly impressed by it. I modded the hell out of Windows to match SL visually.
I’m looking forward to the next SL release, assuming it ever happens.
(Get off my lawn)
The new Settings app seems like an improvement to me. The vertical list of settings categories is easier to quickly scan, and it remains visible all the time. That alone is a great improvement, and makes it quite a bit easier to navigate the (huge) list of available settings.
While using Gnome's style for the settings application is a huge improvement, the implementation is laggy and doesn't scroll smoothly. And it takes a while for each Stack item to load and render when it's selected. x86_64 here.
I haven't used Gnome in decades. To me it looks just like the iPad Settings app, or iPhone's in horizontal mode.
Oh good. I find it by typing "settings" 100% of the time because I can never remember what it's called ("System Preferences", evidently) but that works less-well than it might since that's not the name—it doesn't fully match until I've typed the whole word.