I rather agree with you. There would seem to be far more important things to do.

This is crazy. Why rock an established boat and
move the control buttons, just to put something
-else- there instead?

Mark and his team should have just put the
'windicators' on the left - That way they'd
be useful, and everyone else would be -happy-.

Or even just put them to the left of the control buttons... Although the
control-button to title text may be a nice aesthetic visual, my main concern
(besides getting confused because I have to work from XP during the workday)
would be the potential use of the indicator icons. I can envision some
lovely little Ad/Revenue icons that pop up annoying little text boxes you
can click on to launch new web pages specific to the content you were just
typing into whatever program you are using.

But you can change them back to the right, I have already done that.
So if allowing them to be reconfigured means there may not be any future
plans for any of that space. Maybe they just wanted to look a little like
Apple this time around. Share the wealth so to speak.

I'm not sure allowing them to be reconfigured means no future plans, as the
plans Shuttleworth discusses were posted on his site May 3rd (after the
release of 10.04). --> http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/333 and
he seems rather excited about it. But who knows? I'm sure like most
features, there will probably be a way to turn them off though...