One could reasonably point out that this is a minority view and most reviews of Lion are pretty positive.
That said, I hereby reserve the right to come back in a few days under the unlikely circumstance that my machine blows up and (further unlikely circumstance) that I replace with a mac and tell you that it turns out I also find it to be an "incoherent mess".
Don't sing its praises until you've tried it. Knocking my opinion based on your derivation of "consensus" is pretty dishonest.
Launchpad/Mission Control are simply poor implementations of some sort of iOS-type experience that simply make no sense. Full screen mode on most apps is worse than Snow Leopard, the odd movement into a new screen as a sort-of context switch is plain odd. Restoring windows on Preview/Quicktime leads to you simply having a mess of windows appear as soon as you open the apps.
It is a half-way house between Mac OS X of old and iOS, and it shows. I don't often agree with Gizmodo, but their review seems most like my views on it. I wouldn't have spent the $30 if I didn't want to like it.
I haven't upgraded from Snow Leopard based on what I've read and seen on the UI. I'd basically have to turn off most of the Lion "features" and then what would be the point of even upgrading?
Don't forget about this, which basically resets Lion to better defaults: https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.osx