I disagree. Wikipedia is a similar effort, and yet they have a highly polished look. I agree with the fact that OSM doesn't look as nice as GMaps, and I also agree that a better color/font scheme needs to be implemented if they want 7 billion users.
And this article is the equivalent of say, Canonical taking Debian and saying they're going to make an easy to use desktop linux from it. It will almost certainly be more "polished" and end-user focused than openstreetmap.org, because they serve two different types of users.
Interestingly Wikipedia are actually a user facing front-end for OpenStreetmap data, in fact they have at least 4 projects using slightly different tech to put different front-ends on OSM as appropriate for their usage, e.g. the official Android app uses MapQuest OSM tiles to show articles that relate to your physical surroundings:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia&...
and the german wikipedia has a couple of gadgets in the top right hand corner to show the geographical context of the articles:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kongo_%28Fluss%29
They also extract a lot of vector data from OSM to hand built appropriate maps and diagrams for articles:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aruba_travel_map.png
Again, not always what I'd call polished, but they're making creative use of map data, rather than putting some pins on Google Maps (or on an OSM based clone) and that's a good thing.