I guess they must have made a lot of improvements already in the past week, because most of the points in this article are not (or no longer) true:

Plugin stats are only available to the plugin author by logging into the admin.

I can see this under Advanced View for any plugin without logging in.

Tabbed layout was replaced with a series of Read more links.

This one is true; having everything summarized on the first page along with easy links to get more details for those who need it does not seem like a bad thing to me, though.

Plugin banner images are distorted.

In a quick review of a dozen or so plugins, this didn't appear to be true for any of them.

The Installation tab which provided instructions on how to install the plugin is gone.

True... But this tab is pointless for 99% of plugins, which are installed by clicking the "Install" button in the directory. Couldn't be more simple. Plugins with more complex instructions seem to be adding it under the now-more-prominent FAQ section, which works just as well.

Screenshots do not open in a lightbox, but open on a new page instead.

Yep, that's annoying. This needs to be fixed.

Links to download older versions of plugins is missing.

Nope. They're under Advanced View. I actually found them more easily in the new design than I used to be able to on the old version.

I'm going to assume these were all legitimate issues at some point, but expecting the brand new directory to be absolutely perfect at launch was hardly realistic, and personally I'm extremely impressed at just how rapidly they've improved it in the past 5 days.