I dunno. Is it ever good UI design to replace clearly labeled buttons with cute but confusing icons? Just because you can get used to it doesn't mean it's a good change.
Learning what the icons mean might take a little time and one might argue that spacial patterns are learned when reading anyways.
It's just a few symbols, I doubt that the difference between one symbol and 10 is that different for a learning machine like the human brain. (Especially since the location of the symbols is what matters. They show up in the same place every time, you only need the general shape of the word to confirm that's that right one.)