Oh, and the new charts and table designs in Excel and Powerpoint are beautiful. Some of those screenshots up there already give you a sense of what they're like. Sitting through Powerpoint presentations might finally become bearable again.

This is too awesome, I couldn't stop laughing.

It is kind of like how you put certain colors and patters inside your kids room when they are growing up. Putting a certain "feel" to the UI can ease the user and help them be more productive.

I think the look is starting to grow on me.

That's the point of the contextual ribbons. For several years now, every new release of Office has been adding new features, but it's always followed the same basic paradigm of putting everything within menus or dialog boxes. It's reached the point where it's actually difficult to find and discover many features and options. Interestingly enough, a classic example is right here in this thread - people had no idea how to switch from MDI to SDI mode, let alone what the keyboard shortcut was.

The purpose of displaying contextual ribbons instead of menus and toolbars is to make it easier to find what you're looking for by making it available right in front of your eyes. Click on a table within a Word document, and the ribbon automatically changes to display the most commonly used table layout and formatting options. Click on a chart, and now you only see chart-related functionality. Of course, since there are just so many advanced features within each of the products in the Office family, it's impossible to expose them all to the user in this manner, but the basic idea is that commonly-performed tasks will get much quicker and easier.

Try taking a shower, that growth should wash right off

Is it gonna be worth it... Office 200y i mean...
Will it make that much of a difference in our everyday lives if we still use office 2003?