Not to intentionally play the middle but I can see both sides of this. Lion can be considered a finished product but it feels like the OS is in the beginning of a metamorphosis and it may be vastly different 5-10 years from now.
Honestly haven't used Lion myself but this seems to be a consensus view. "Incoherent mess" does not seem to be the consensus view.
That said, I hereby reserve the right to come back in a few days under the unlikely circumstance that my machine blows up and (further unlikely circumstance) that I replace with a mac and tell you that it turns out I also find it to be an "incoherent mess".
Honestly haven't used Lion myself but this seems to be a consensus view.
Don't sing its praises until you've tried it. Knocking my opinion based on your derivation of "consensus" is pretty dishonest.
Launchpad/Mission Control are simply poor implementations of some sort of iOS-type experience that simply make no sense. Full screen mode on most apps is worse than Snow Leopard, the odd movement into a new screen as a sort-of context switch is plain odd. Restoring windows on Preview/Quicktime leads to you simply having a mess of windows appear as soon as you open the apps.
It is a half-way house between Mac OS X of old and iOS, and it shows. I don't often agree with Gizmodo, but their review seems most like my views on it. I wouldn't have spent the $30 if I didn't want to like it.
Nothing Steko said was dishonest. (S)he claimed that the consensus view is that Lion is pretty good, and, while numbers weren't provided, just looking at the mainstream papers/sites, strongly negative ones are a tiny minority.
I haven't upgraded from Snow Leopard based on what I've read and seen on the UI. I'd basically have to turn off most of the Lion "features" and then what would be the point of even upgrading?
I'm not especially happy I upgraded. I find myself working against Lion's new features more often than with.