I think these are very much a step in the right direction. This is the reason I have been using the Fluency plugin for so long.

It saves screen real estate and doesn't make you scroll up and down endlessly. Having multiple sub-menus open on the prev. WP meant that the page could become cumbersome.

If this leads to a revolt I hope they at least make it an optional feature you can enable per user profile (like the visual editor)