Is looking at them significantly worse than looking at the car traffic on a major street in the rush hour? As far as the sound is concerned, I doubt that the effects are anything more than purely psychological. There are established hygienic limits for a reason.
If I had to hear that pulsing all day, every day, during my sleep, for the rest of my life...I could see it being a problem.
I've seen some studies that indicated that the infra-sound levels from city traffic are significantly stronger than the noise coming from wind turbines conforming to established noise regulations. Do people have problems with the wind turbine noise? Some perhaps do, but why isn't the even stronger car noise a reason for a radical change in car noise hygienic limits within cities? It would be a hypocrisy to tackle one due to public pressure and ignore the other.
EDIT: Oh, and I also vaguely recall that the low-frequency sound caused by the wind interacting with buildings around you is also supposed to be stronger than the same frequency sound coming from distant wind turbines. (The stronger the wind, the stronger the noise from both sources, so it's always comparable.) It makes sense, if you think about it. The law of inverse squares and all that jazz.
"If I had to hear that pulsing all day, every day, during my sleep, for the rest of my life...I could see it being a problem."
I live next to a major city exit road. Before that, I lived in a house that had a freight railway station across the street. I've never noticed any problems.
That said, the question of why those people are living in the middle of nowhere doesn't come up at all. I think that's the more important issue. If you want to reduce the environmental footprint, reducing the size of sprawl and suburban/rural population size would save a lot of energy.
For you, no problems. For others, there might be. And if you do have a problem for example falling asleep when there is sound, the sound from the turbines is nasty as with such low sound you can't block it with earplugs. I'm not saying you should care, just a fyi that some people do have to care about this for their own sanity.
I can't even imagine what it is like living even closer to one.
I love looking at windmills too but then I don't look and listen to them all day.
As far as power generation I'm amazed the ground windmill approach is as popular as it is. It's not efficient. It has serious limitations. Seems like a craze. But then the incredibly inefficient coal plants were a craze too. Electric lights and vacuum cleaners, how did we live without them! We can make coal plants far more efficient. A 10% efficiency increase would be bigger than the renewable industry in the US. We can also make wind kites which make a lot more sense. Lets see if we bother.