It's unfortunate but understandable that the Avatars have grabbed the most attention out of all the NXE's new additions. You see while the grinning Mii-too cartoon characters had led many people - us included - to expect a horrible, tween-oriented, My Dashboardz abomination, NXE is actually a pretty damn classy interface.
It sounds strange when talking about something that's essentially a set of images on a 2D screen, but NXE has a really airy and expansive feel about it. While we personally have no problem at all with our beloved blades, an hour with NXE showed up just how much we didn't know we were missing. We'd never understood those who complain that the current dashboard feels clunky and crowded. Going back to it for comparison after NXE however, we now really do.
The main element responsible for that is undoubtedly the new floating windows layout. Where currently all the information related to a particular area of the Xbox 360 is crammed onto a single page and hidden behind further menus, the new windows give all of the functionality a lot more breathing space. A vertically scrolling text menu contains every sub-section - Welcome, Spotlight, the Marketplaces, Friends etc. - with each flick up or down bringing up a run of horizontally scrolling windows detailing that area's content.