I believe this is primarily to fix the latency that existed when you tapped the little search bar up top. Before, the Search APK had to be launched—now its already running.
Does anybody actually use that search bar though? Maybe I'm alone, but I have a sort of "banner blindness" to the search bar -- I always swipe up from the home button to do a Google search no matter whether I want to see my Google Now cards or not.
I never use either. I open Firefox and tap my search terms into the awesome bar.
Wouldn't it be great if you could have Firefox as the home screen for your phone...
Oh wait!
Honestly, the number of times I switch apps when I meant to switch tabs in Firefox, I'd be pretty interested in a Firefox-based launcher/recent apps picker. Especially since Firefox has gotten better with the "open in an app" option in recent versions of Firefox/Android, I think it might be a powerful new launcher paradigm.
Ha. I just got a ZTE Open, mostly to hack on. It's cool, but not ready to be my primary phone yet.
I was blind to it for a long time. Now I use it all the time. It's very convenient, really.
I removed the widget from my homescreen. But I'm running Android ICS still. Maybe it can't be removed in the later versions?
Its not actually the search bar that's important: the Google Search APK is where all of the Google Now functionality lives. This change basically turns the home screen into Google Now.