I can finally join the hordes of those who think that a Mac OS is butt-ugly. I use my MacBook daily, for hours a day, and I KNOW what it looks like, and this update changed things for the much worse.

It seems as though the video gain was cranked way up, and colors are over-saturated. Font smoothing is also affected. At 12 point the edges of text have a faint multi-color aura. This is absent at larger sizes, but even massive text is no longer truly smooth.

The transparent/translucent menus are solid white. There is not the slightest hint of transparency. Since Apple didn't say that they were removing menu transparency, it's probably all related.

I tried resetting p-ram, to no effect.

I have no doubt Steve will get it all worked out in the end. In the meantime, count the cost of the update.