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Oh my god its here! What now? Did they really have to change it SOOO much? I feel like i'm going to have to start all over learning blender. It does look tons better and I've heard it is much easier to use. I hope so. Any thoughts on the subject?

Argh, I just installed the release candidate yesterday.. Ah well.
The UI does look quite different at first, especially the change of the 'space bar menu',but you get used to it quite quickly. It's much cleaner, much more organised, and there are little widgets here and there that improve productivity quite a bit. The new Toolbar in the 3D view is neat (T key).
It still needs a bit of refinement (this is not the final release yet); and there are some basic features that are somehow still missing (hey Blender developers, the polygon modelling workflow *need* the bevel tool okay?), but for the most part it's very usable, and since this is the future of Blender now is a good time to download it and start to get used to it..

We fear change.

I've been using the beta version for some time now*for non-uru stuff, so I could follow some cool tutorials, and I'm quite used to it now. I like it and it will make blender more attractive to people who currently use 3dmax( at least one of my teachers commented "it looks a lot more like max now" when I showed him, I honestly don't see it...but teachers are always right, not? >.>)

Aloys wrote:The UI does look quite different at first, especially the change of the 'space bar menu',...

Hint: Under [File] => [User Preferences] => [Add-Ons] set the checkbox for [3D View: Dynamic Spacebar Menu], which adds much more options when spacebar is hit, especially the [Add Object Menu].
There you will find the well-known objects from Blender 2.49b.
And there are *many* other additional features under Add-Ons, mostly disabled by default; just try some. Of course, simply enabling them all may result in blowing our brain because of the huge count of new choices / options / menus.

EDIT:
By the way, our official source for getting stable Blender releases should be this:
http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/

(and NOT graphicall.org. Well, sure, it's up to each individual to try slightly different builds with other features, but I guess this could lead to problems sooner or later eventually)

... unless otherwise stated.

Tachzusamm wrote:Hint: Under [File] => [User Preferences] => [Add-Ons] set the checkbox for [3D View: Dynamic Spacebar Menu], which adds much more options when spacebar is hit, especially the [Add Object Menu].
There you will find the well-known objects from Blender 2.49b.

I have seen that, but this is weird how they have disabled some options like this one by default although they are important. Like disabling the Copy menu. What the heck?
This is just change for the sake of change, and doesn't help you learn the new interface. I wish they had some basic documentation about the changes because as it stands there is none, and discovering all by yourself is not easy.

Here's a page from blenderguru.com which could be of help for the transition from 2.49b to 2.5:
http://www.blenderguru.com/whered-that-button-go/

(written for 2.5 Alpha, but still useful)

Very useful thanks! I'd seen that article a while ago but I had forgotten about it.
Now the one thing I can't find so far is the old Scripts editor. It has totally disapeared. There's the Text editor that allow you to open and run Python scripts but that's quite cumbersome and that doesn't seem to work for all 2.4x scripts anyway.
I haven't yet tried to actually export an Age with 2.5 but i have a feeling that'll be enlightening.. Anyone have some experience with this?

Aloys wrote:Very useful thanks! I'd seen that article a while ago but I had forgotten about it.
Now the one thing I can't find so far is the old Scripts editor. It has totally disapeared. There's the Text editor that allow you to open and run Python scripts but that's quite cumbersome and that doesn't seem to work for all 2.4x scripts anyway.
I haven't yet tried to actually export an Age with 2.5 but i have a feeling that'll be enlightening.. Anyone have some experience with this?

The text editor is the right place to do scripting in blender 2.5. They heavily modified the Python API, so most 2.4x scripts will be broken in 2.57

Branan wrote:The text editor is the right place to do scripting in blender 2.5. They heavily modified the Python API, so most 2.4x scripts will be broken in 2.57

Lots of scripts will be lost because of that. :/ The joys of compatibilty breaking versions..