OK,
so after playing with the new office I am proud to announce: nothing much has really changed... again
In the commercial they have dropdown menus, but the ribbon UI is still king of the day. Word, Excel, and PPT are all essentially the same as they were in office 2007, whith the noted exception of social media outputs for Word, and a simi-inteligent auto fill feature in Excel (which could be more annoying than useful).
I have not seen publisher sense OfficeXP, and it has changed a bit... but that is to be expected for such a horrible program that has had 10 years to change. Access has made a few changes for the better it seems (again, a program that needed improvement anyways). OneNote seems pretty well left alone.
Outlook seems to be a disaster. It is downright hard to look at. Take this with a grain of salt however as I have always hated Outlook, and really hated that it forces you into a specific workflow... which is aparantly incompatible with my own. I do like the new features of Outlook, and it had no troubbles with my google and hotmail accts (obviously yahoo is not supported unless you pay for YMail... but that is no fault of MS). I also like the 'peak' idea, but do not like that they moved it all to the bottom of the screen making it feel more than ever like 4 disconnected programs tossed together (mail, calendar, people/contacts, and tasks). I find my eye unable to focus on the emails, and seperate where one begins and the next one ends. It just looks like a mess.
For the whole suite:
I generally like the new Metro/cosmo look for desktop, and if this is what we can expect Win8 desktop applications to look like then I am all for it, though I will miss Aero's wonderful transparent look. I do not understand why they have not moved the headers for the ribbonUI to the title bar. Sure, keep it where it is when on a portable device, but when full screen on a 27" monitor it makes for a lot of dead-space.... bright white glaring dead space. All of the application's face-lifts are nice with the exception of Outlook which is simply difficult to look at, even if it is easier to use. I like that programs take the whole boarder of the program space (no more 'Window' space on the edge). However, this now means that you cannot resize a window until it is actively selected. Great for a mobile device, but just one more step for desktop users. I also like that each program takes on the color of it's icon, which is a simple visual cue for what you are interacting with.
Everything else though feels much the same as it has always been. I may upgrade in order to get newer versions of Access and Publisher, but otherwise it feels much the same as it has been for the last 5 years. Either way I will play with it for a bit and see if any 'must have' features surface.... but I find this unlikely.