He's spot on. The removal of the plus to create a new tab in Chrome is bad design, period.

I hadn't noticed the lack of the logo link until someone else pointed it out. Why would anyone reduce ease of navigation, particularly from an object that is going to be there anyway?

I use Gmail as my main email application, and have since they first launched it. They've started to annoy me with the interface changes. I think they've lost some of the intuitive simplicity that made Gmail great. It feels about 10% like Yahoo's extraordinarily horrific web email, and that's a big step down.