You can disable all the tabs and return to your normal inbox.

That, unfortunately, doesn't seem to work on the Android client (did that for the webapp). I'd give the app a bad rating for becoming more and more crappy, but I have no G+ account, cannot have a G+ account and therefor are unable to participate..

I disabled it on the web client and those labels do not appear on the Android app for me.

Additionally, you can disable the promotions tab individually. I just have "Updates" and "Forums". For now, it seems very easy to opt out.

For now.

Which is where we currently live, so that's good.

I think people are mad because it seems inevitable that, like all other new Gmail features/UI changes/etc., it will become mandatory within less than a year.

How do you do that?

Click on the + sign next to the tabs. Uncheck everything except "Primary" (which you can't uncheck anyway)

You know what's funny? You do that and when you look there are still unread things in there that it pulls from the inbox. Once you dispose of them in the inbox, they do disappear, though.

There's actually a number of different inbox layouts available in Settings.

This was my reaction to the tabs as well - now I have three inboxes to keep clean instead of one! I disabled them as soon as I could figure out how to.

If you are following an inbox zero approach (as I am), then there's not much point in using the sectioned inbox IMO. I guess it might be useful if you receive tons of email and you want to sort of go through it in an ordered manner, but normally I tend to unsubscribe from things I am not interested in, so there are little or no messages in the other sections.

I do inbox zero as implied above and I thought I'd hate the sectioned tabs but I actually love it. Only because I make sure the primary inbox is cleared constantly, but can take my time getting to the social one (where it's very easy to just select all and delete).

I'm not sure that your OCD is their problem.

On the contrary, they take advantage of this kind of behavior to ensure that he sees their ads. It's a problem they created and exacerbate for their own profit.

This is the whole point of 'gamification.' Dropping a number back down to zero is a form of this.

Total # of emails however can be setup to show only your "Primary" inbox. This allows me to check the other tabs much much less often since I'm only motivated to keep the # to 0.