Those not following the implementation of concepts from http://d7ux.org/ here is a quick summary of the three main areas:
- The header toolbar from http://www.d7ux.org/header/ is in Drupal 7 already (in the form of toolbar module). Icons are missing (still to be discussed, see http://drupal.org/node/13911#comment-1701664) and customizable shortcuts (http://drupal.org/node/511286) are still under discussion. You can override, revoke permissions and disable the header if you don't want to use/see it, but it is enabled in the default profile by design. There are also some other smaller follow up issues you can find and contribute to from http://drupal.org/node/484820
- We are hard at work on the overlay. You should be able to use it without the admin theme and toolbar (or with a different admin theme and/or toolbar), but it is aware of the admin toolbar. There seems to be mostly some positioning issues to overcome here, see http://drupal.org/node/517688
- We are working on the admin theme as well, which Young Hahn christened the Slate theme. The looks of the theme when not in the overlay is still to be refined, but themer reviews are showing good results. Again, this would be the default admin theme for Drupal 7 but will be configurable. See http://drupal.org/node/484860
There are lots of things going on improving user experience even in relatively large scales additionally to these three, but given how close the code freeze is, I am trying to get attention to these three, and especially the overlay and the admin theme, so we can get them in sooner then later.
Minor issues?
There are also some other smaller follow up issues you can find and contribute to from http://drupal.org/node/484820
All of the new, related issues are critical.
I'd re-phrase this into "We made progress regarding the toolbar, but there are still some major issues to solve."
The interesting thing still is that most of those new features could be _properly_ implemented via http://drupal.org/project/admin in contrib, but somehow, people think that D7 seems to be a completely new beast providing completely new interaction functions - which is simply not true, again, for most of those new features.
That is, because this "toolbar" provides a menu. And the menu system didn't really change between D6 and D7 (yet). I can highly understand core contributors giving up on some of the currently faced (new for core, but major) issues, because they are exactly where other menu modules in contrib are stuck in the menu system as well.
We will - step by step - see the exactly same issues that already exist for various contributed modules. Most interestingly, the maintainers of those modules were left alone during those UX improvements/movements.
The only sub-system we did it right was fields in core. And we still benefit from that.
As much as I like this entire effort, I don't like the paradigm behind it, sorry.
critical?
Ok, I've counted 9 referenced follow up issues from disabling the management menu by default through new functionality to add such as customizable shortcuts to sticky table headers being bogus with the toolbar and only 2 of them are critical. If you think more of them are, then set them to critical with your reasoning please. Most of them seem smaller in terms of changes required or new code being added, some might not be smaller in terms of discussion to be taken (eg. the page rendering issue which Moshe, catch, webchick and others drove into wildly different directions and finally seem settled).
Not sure how http://drupal.org/project/admin diverged from the original D7 patch (which was this same module in a patch form), but since we kept using the same positioning and menu presentation techniques, I wonder how different are these in terms of possible open issues like the sticky table headers or keyboard navigation. Seems like we only made minor adjustments in markup since the original patch which was committed as this Drupal 6 module, so I am not sure how it is better in terms of fixes required elsewhere in Drupal.
Not sure why do you feel the maintainer of contrib modules were left alone. I guess you might mean they were not provided places to integrate in the IA of the planned D7 admin, but that was pretty well covered by Leisa and Roy among others: http://www.yoroy.com/2009/reorganize-drupal-admin-items-within-d7ux-fra… If this is not the area you feel neglected, then please elaborate. For the menu issues in particular, I am more then happy that we help them surface in core itself, since that means they are more likely fixed.