The screen indeed is great. To bad they sacrificed the 17" for it.
And I wouldn't call the change to the ports anything amazing.
Compared to the Air the new ports are great. They are fit for a 15" Air.
But suppose you need Ethernet and Firewire and are not willing to pay 400$ for a Belkin docking station or 1000$ for a Thunderbolt display and instead you use the Apple adapters which are not daisy-chainable. You end up with only one HDMI port for the display which in most non-TV cases will be inferior to mini-DisplayPort (most monitors work better with DP-more accurate colors , TVs only come with HDMI and are optimized for it).
With the DVD drive removed they actually had a lot of space for ports.
They could have ALSO (extra to what it already has) included:
-4 USB 3.0 instead of 2 ports one of which could be a USB 3.0/eSATAp combo port (or a separate eSATA or USB2/eSATAp port if they don't want to mix it with USB 3.0)
-separate audio connectors
-proprietary mini ports and adapters for GbE and FW800(if they didn't want to add a bulge for them for esthetic reasons)
-infrared sensor(port) for remote control (because physical buttons with feedback are useful on a remote, so don't say "use the iPhone")
-even a ExpressCard slot (in which you could also fit the remote for travel) but they abandoned that standard
-mini-VGA (because it is still the most useful to have) but they abandoned this one too.(TB-> VGA requires an ACTIVE convertor)
P.S.: Yes, there exists USB3.0/eSATAp combo ports:
http://www.esatap.sg/featured/usb-3-0-or-esatap-6gbps-why-not-both/
http://www.delock.de/produkte/G_65285/merkmale.html?setLanguage=en
And eSATA (even the old SATA II 3Gbps based version) is still A LOT FASTER than USB 3.0. (It has slower burst speeds but higher sustained speeds because it has DMA)