Actually you only lose features you wouldn't want in the first place and would drag the whole thing down (less battery life, bulkier, etc). Not having FM radio for example is like not having a floppy disk drive an modern PCs.
As for "incredibly well polished and thought out" it still is. For one, there's much more to a mobile OS than graphic design. How it works and feels is much more important than how it looks ("design is how it works").
Second, most of those are some guy's pet peeves, not genuine problems. If he cannot understand why a red carret matches blue text, that doesn't make it into a genuine problem. Same if he didn't get the memo that drop shadows are used to add a depth to the UI layers and thinks they are stray leftovers.
