For me personally, this is a great change. I was expecting texture masking to be reworked at some point, because it sporadically causes 'script ran too long' errors in combat when applying new textures to an already masked entity.
I had to essentially create four different textures for each modifier state in use and manipulate their alpha values (hiding / showing textures causes them to be redrawn), and overlay them on my controller action bars, just to minimise the amount of frame rate drops and sporadic errors due to an icon change in combat. I can probably remove all the code I wrote to circumvent this issue.
While round action buttons were entirely possible before, this could also allow for some pretty interesting shapes and techniques for UI designers that were not possible previously.
