Silvery - 8:26 pm on Oct 12, 2009 (gmt 0)

It is more attractive, I'd say.

Easier to read, which is likely good for usability.

Also, it's probably engineered to better target the number of choices which users are more likely to want to have.

It does tend to increase the urgency surrounding the basis for choosing which businesses make it into the highly-desired seven positions. There's been less education on the part of Google regarding rankings of Google Maps slots compared with education provided around rankings in regular websearch results.