I don't really think it was stale or stagnated exactly. You probably saw recently a few posts about how much work goes into them and why exactly they're better than Apple's or Microsoft's. It's very subtle and fundamental stuff. They didn't change much, it's true, but that's because the competition was so bad and they leapfrogged them by so much at the beginning.

We'll see how the new look works in action - I can't say I see a huge improvement, though there are definitely a few features that make it more at-a-glance effective.