Copying the iPhone (finger-only) is not an improvement.
Going more finger-friendly is an improvement.

Some apps lend themselves to finger usage much better than others; modest is an example. The addition of the wide scrollbar really does make that nice.

Switching the menus to be pressure-insensitive seems good to me; cool as the idea was, there's too much variation in finger and stylus taps to effectively discriminate by pressure.
Where they goofed on that (to me) seems to be giving us only one choice; if we could select the icon size (or, since it was already written, even select to auto-detect) we wanted, it would be better.

I've heard no other specific complaints about the finger-friendliness; the UI overall seems neither better nor worse, because of dumb stuff Nokia pulled on us, but the actual finger enhancements seem good to me.

OS2008 is better for me; better battery life is worth having (and I get that with OS2008, courtesy of CPU frequency scaling), and USB host-mode is really nice, too.