Safari was in need of an overhaul - Chrome, Atomic, and other browsers were so much better that I pretty much stopped using Safari.

From what I saw in this review, the new Safari offers much more functionality than the prior version, devoting substantially more pixels to content and offering the iCloud Keychain feature.

I do agree though that the functionality hasn't improved significantly for most of the other apps. I'd be way more excited if the Control Center offered customization. My two most frequent settings (Cellular on/off, Location Services on/off) aren't in Control Center so it doesn't really give me much.