Oh, I disabled that early on so I forgot about it. The only one of significance was the start menu corner, but that was also remedied in 8.1.
>settings split into multiple different places that used to be collected in one place
The settings panel is the same as Windows 10. I'd definitely argue against all settings being in one place on 7 though. There's dozens of different locations: control panel, the registry, local/group policy editor, folder options, the "advanced" system settings panel (contains completely unrelated settings such as environmental variables, performance toggles, DEP, and remote assistance). Then there's lots of weird quirky menus like the one you get by entering "control userpasswords2" into the run dialog.
I see the new settings panel as a cleaner frontend to the existing settings. Hopefully over time they'll be consolidated there.
>flat UI elements
I love it.
>two conflicting interfaces (tablet UI on a mouse-based device? bleh).
I don't see the conflict, but the start screen worked just fine on mouse for me. It took a week to relearn some muscle memory and then I was over it. In the end I found it much more efficient. The targets were larger and it didn't waste a ton of screen space like the current start menu does.