Edit: I guess you could say Google's Evernote competitor is just Google Drive itself. If you want text formatting, create an actual Doc. Keep seems to be explicitly for short-form, simple note taking. I think there's a large market for that.
The facts are that Evernote has in excess of 30M users, with lots of paying users and growing rapidly. There is no evidence that this mythical complexity is affecting adoption.
And I don't see how Google Drive and Evernote are competition. Very different use cases.
The only possible phrase that could be construed as needing "data" to back it up is "lots of people" being unsatisfied with evernote's complexity (which is not a statement about that affecting evernote's adoption, incidentally), and it's a statement that could arguably be satisfied with an anecdote in any case.
You pulled the trigger on the negativity gun a little early here, even for you.
Given the fact that they are saying access from the Drive UI is coming soon, I suspect the release was rushed after the accidental leak. I wouldn't expect them to release a new Drive app when that requires a separate URL before its integrated into the Drive UI.
OTOH, its not unheard of for Google to introduce a new service in a fairly minimal form and rapidly add features once it is deployed. So, that could be the plan (and, of course, both could be true -- this could be an ahead-of-schedule, and less-complete-than-planned deployment of something that was planned to be released in what would have been a fairly minimal form anyway.)
Do you have a link for that? I was wondering why it wasn't integrated better with the rest of Drive, and that would make sense.
Last sentence: "You can access, edit and create new notes on the web at http://drive.google.com/keep and in the coming weeks you'll be able to do the same directly from Google Drive."
Off-topic, but does anyone remember the time when Google's UI consisted of just a textbox with their logo on a plain web page? And how they were getting tonnes of praise for that?