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KDE 4 looks dull and old-fashioned. I understand it's still an alpha version, but they need to call for graphic designers. It seems to be created by software developers. Icons are not too bad, though, but I would expect something more shiny, more sexy, you know, something that attracts your attention, something that when you see it, you want to have it on your computer. It almost looks like Gnome with dull colors and plain bars. The KDE team should visit some Web 2.0 web sites and see how to make KDE a lot more eye-candy. Proprietary OSes are very good-looking, why can't open-source OSes?!

That's going to happen next. Before now it was more important to get the libraries right, as it doesn't help anyone to get a flashy desktop and then have to recode the entire thing all over again after the libraries are fixed.

Sounds like what you're wanting is new widgets... which are on the way, but not ready yet. From the article:

Cool your jets. This is alpha.

Most of what you see in the screen shots is old KDE3 stuff running on KDE4 libraries. The eye-candy you are referring to is present, but not active. When they are active, KDE4 will look nothing like KDE3.

Of course, had you actually read the article, you would have read:

For those looking for eye candy, the new composite-enabled branch of KWin has been merged but the composite features are still disabled by default, and the Oxygen icons are in, but the new Oxygen widget style is still too immature to be included. The basics of Plasma are there (try Alt-F2, and check out the new Run Command dialog as shown on the right), but most of the changes are still only in the libraries, so Kicker, the KDE 3 panel, is still present when you log in.

Yeah, this article is like the "Shock and Awe" slide in a presentation where you try to overwhelm the audience with the sheer volume of improvements. It worked on me. I'm impressed with what they're doing, and I'll be even more impressed if they hit their November 1 release target.