KDE4

I just spent a few minutes, literally only a few, tooling around in KDE 4, and I come away with this impression:
Big. Fat. Hairy. Deal.
It's a new skin and slower than molasses. I guess the comparison's that people have been making betwixt KDE4 and Windows Vista are on target.
Now, to be fair, I'm sure there are some things going on in KDE4 under the hood that are impressive and even nifty. But from an end-user standpoint -- and a fan of the GNOME Desktop-- I'm not impressed.
I'm going to wait until a version of Ubuntu is up and running with a full KDE4 livecd before I make any final decisions, but let me address just this one thing:
Why does the default setup for KDE insist on having that gigantic tool bar at the bottom? Why? Why? It's absurd.
It's as ridiculous on the MacOS insistence on putting the tool bars at the top of the screen instead of on the window.
I'm not saying that KDE doesn't have some magic, I guess the new skin is pretty and all, and I've been told, over and over again, that KDE 4 is the "start of something amazing." I just wish they'd tell me what goodness is to come. Also, KDE has widgets now. Something in the startup que for me to turn off. Goodie.

Bottom line: I'm just not impressed. Once again, instead of focusing development efforts on stuff that will make using Linux _functional_, the major development efforts have focused on a prettier shell.
Sigh.
Look, I'll use the command line if you'll just make my webcam work out of the box. Isn't plug-and-play that actually works a better place for KDE-- as well as Linux development to be focused?

Also, just for fun, I wrote this post in Kate. The KDE text editor, and one of the best text editors in all of programming, with the stupidest name.