Well, I tried it out on the way home from work and on the way to work this morning.
I normally use it every day as a guide to how bad the traffic is going to be and generally leave it on the route overview screen.
This doesn’t seem to be as easy to navigate around as it used to be and it’s not so easy to turn traffic layers on and off while in the nav mode. You have to exit the navigation by going ‘back’ until you get to just maps.
Also, the lack of +/- zoom buttons is a pain. Hopefully they will add them in as a lot of people seem to be grumbling about that.
I also don’t like the way you can’t go to ‘alternative routes’ while in the nav mode, but you have to go ‘back’ to the maps screen and flick between the options, rather than being able to toggle through them as buttons at the top of the page. It looks slick, but seems to be a step backwards in terms of functionality.
They have tried to tie the appearance in with Google Now with I tried for a few weeks, but found it wasn’t really coming up with anything I didn’t already know, so I turned it off.