Justin Khoo: "Dear Gmail: Two years ago, you launched an ambitious endeavor with Schema.org to bring a new level of richness to email. Schema.org allowed senders to embed rich meta data in email that allowed any modern email client, not just Gmail, to present actionable items within email."
But you can still go back to the old layout if you prefer.
Overall, this looks like a decent UI update for people that use multiple Google services.
Spam runs rampant on Gmail, but you have options.