New UI widgets, new phone functionality (so what?), and enough compatibility so that most apps work by changing this and that widget, and even some of them work without recompiling. Evolution, yes; but hardly a "fresh start".

The /opt stuff is a hack. And it was decided late in the game.
But it has been discussed ad infinitum. Every alternative here discussed was already discussed both in the mailing lists and in the BOF session (including, but not limited to, aufs). And still, /opt was deemed to be the best solution at this stage.

And about the next device, we don't even know if it's still going to ship with a OneNAND, so it's early to discuss here. Hopefully though, Nokia will present us with a proper plan instead of "Don't worry about it" when the first community alarm bells ring (and they did ring! when the first Eldar comments about the 256MiB rootfs appeared).