So I think I like the new launcher/patcher/whatever you want to call it. But, it still has some quirks.
Any terrain that hasn't loaded has a mottle blue translucent box about 30-50% larger than the object itself that you can't enter (but can get stuck on the corner of) that will disappear once the texture itself is downloaded. It's possible to glitch these out and get through them, but it often results in falling through the world. You usually get thrown back up into the air after you fall far enough, which works well for my druid and priest but not my other toons.
EVERYTHING is loaded in parts. The map. The minimap. The freaking talent trees. I had 1/3 of my talents available (one spec) for viewing for a good ten minutes. Sounds seem to be put behind a lot of other things, which is probably better than hearing but not seeing stuff.
Also, for those running it under wine: you may need the patch at
http://bugs.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=29301 to get the installer to get past 2%. Once you get the game installed, the launcher will freak out until it gets past a certain point downloading the patch/game...but it will keep going in the background even if the launcher itself closes. You can verify that by watching your download activity or checking that Blizzard Downloader.exe is running. If it isn't for some reason, you can also open Wow directly (run wow.exe instead of the launcher) and leave it at the login screen; it will download in the background (though much more slowly). I was getting 300-500 kB/s with the background process and 20-30 with Wow open.
Of course, this is all during the yellow part, where they tell you it'll act weird. I don't have the patience to wait for green.
![Wink](//cdn-wow.mmoui.com/images/style_mmoi_wowi2/smilies/wink.gif)
I only stopped to post this because the world server crashed.
EDIT: it seems the download after the Launcher closes is not as consistent as I thought. Running Wow directly will still work though.