I'm with you on every point. I'll even go as far as to say that they don't want you to use the menu.

I'm just throwing this out there, but I think they want people to stay on the search screen. They want you to search for everything to get to something. Reader? Search for Reader. Gmail? Search for Gmail.

If you use search more, they have more opportunity to make money from ads. I'm not sure how much they care about any other product so this could be why every other product is now harder to get to.