"The "Contextual Tabs" would drive me nuts."

They are surprisingly unobtrusive. Considering you tend to end up doing most of the text based stuff (changing font, font size and font styles) through either keyboard shortcuts or the new "floaty" (a small toolbar that appears hovered unobtrusively near selected text) there is most of the time no need to ever switch out of a context tab. And unlike VS "debug" mode, the layout is not all completely changed, new bars don't pop-up to shift the layout of everything, including the main edit window. Just a new tab slides and fades into view. And then only when you’re dealing with non-text. Which, apart from tables, is not very often at all. It also doesn’t force a switch. When you add, say, a table, it will logically switch to the new table format tab. But if you are in the write tab, or even any of the other tabs, and you select the table, it won’t switch to the new context tab for you. The new tab will appear, but it won’t automatically select it for you.

I've been using the UI for a few days now and it's very impressive. Everything *is* at your fingertips. You hear people talk about it only taking 1 or 2 hours to get used to it. I was at home within a minute or so. But then I had watched the Channel9 video’s on it.

"And I do hope that it is fully operational without a mouse."

Press Alt and text labels will appear over everything. Type the letter(s) that appear in that text label and it will select that tab/drop-down selection/option. Similar to the old system, except it's changed very slightly to work with the ribbon interface. The fact that it uses text overlays means that it can be used on all UI elements, and is more obvious than an underlined letter. So you can use keyboard navigation for any sort of button etc. that doesn't even have a text label.

"A menu of that many items obviously won't scale well, but maybe thats just a symptom of a greater problem."

I don't know if I'm understanding you correctly, but the Office team designed the ribbon simply because there was that many items (i.e. similar to the firefox illustrated). And it works really well. All the simple things are to hand. But so are all the more complex things. Unobtrusivly, but also not hidden away.

"I watched the Office ribbons demo and I think it’s mostly just eye candy."

I would completely disagree. It really does dramatically improve productivity and discoverability. Word (and the rest of Office) is already a pretty solid base line. It’s already very good at what it’s meant to do – help you write documents quickly. Now it makes it easier to go the next step – documents that look pretty.

Some of the features, like “Quick Formatting” has been around for ages. You’ve always been able to use headers and pre-defined headings, but it’s been hidden away, people didn’t know how to use it and it was slightly cryptic. Now people can use headers a lot easier, with all the benefit of automatic style updating, table of contents and all the rest.

The interface really does help you to get at pretty much every feature in little more than 2 clicks maximum. Surely that dramatically increases productivity over cascading menu’s up to 4 deep and remembering various shortcuts? Isn’t that a lot more than just eye candy?

You only highlight the new features in Word. Excel has new features that really dramatically improve it. The whole new table paradigm really improves how you use Excel and what you can do with it. And it’s a new feature that will pretty much be used by everyone every time they use Excel, it’s that useful.

“Most of my writing today tends to be in email”

If you use Outlook there will be a lightweight (or slightly more advanced if you have Word installed) version when writing your emails. But I agree, it should be extended so anyone can include it.

“The new ribbon is just a bandaid, not a cure.”

To all who don’t mind the possible dodgy legal implications I urge to download Office 2007 (find a torrent or something) and try it out for 20 minutes. I’m almost certain you will be converted :) It really does solve the problem very well. Even with all the functionality, whatever the feature you’re looking for it can be found in one of 8 tabs (including the possibility of 2 extra tabs if an object is selected). Doesn’t take long at all to scan through them.

“its a set of applications that have grown too complex”

There is only 1 feature in the first 4 tabs I would never use. I use most of them regularly. I wouldn’t really use the Mailings tab, but a lot of people would. And I would occasionally use a lot of the features in the Review tab. So Word hasn’t outgrown itself to become too complex an application at all. And now I know where everything is. Previously I was managing all the references in my essays myself. Now I can use the excellent tools they provide that I have just discovered.