The wordpress design is great, lots of useful features and easy to use. But the voice of that guy in the screencast sounds like a sex phone operator or something, it was a bit freaky.
Nothing on the web really satisfies me interface-wise. Some Flash apps come close, but they break browser keyboard shortcuts. So, desktop apps: foobar2000, uTorrent, Directory Opus, Thunderbird. Eclipse has a brilliant drag-and-split arrange, though I wish it was Emacs everywhere else. And Dropbox's desktop integration (no UI) is great.
Github (github.com) is beautiful all around. Git can be complicated, but github made setting up a repo there so easy that I made several just yesterday.
Actually, I just saw one of the creators demo it at a ruby conference, and he couldn't even figure out how to great a pull request on his own app. So, I'm going to have to say, NOT a great UX there.
Picasa (desktop version) and vim. Mac OS X "Settings" dialog (among others) with real-time feedback.
Nothing on the web comes close to a decent desktop/console speed and usability yet: most of it is slow, laggy and the keyboard is nearly useless. gMail is a good exception.
I love the iPod UI/UX. For mobile phones Nokia is the best I've tried (I've not tried the iPhone). Dead-tree books. Analogic watches/clocks. Gmail. Emacs. Quicksilver. A heavy metal concert. Amazon.
I must admit I suck at using Google Maps. I don't use it that often, and I still haven't quite figured out how to zoom in to the place I am looking for. I would expect to be able to do it with the mouse wheel, but somehow it never works out quite right. I keep having to use the sliders and occasionally readjusting the focus.
So I can't give Google Maps a very good rating for usability.
Ok, now I figured it out: the wheel still puts the focus on the position on the mouse pointer. I somehow expect it to just zoom into the middle - perhaps I am used to it from some other software. Now that I know it, I guess my user experience will be greatly improved ;-)
Did this get modded down because of the design or because a friend of mine did it?
Not that I mind, I'm just curious as to whether there is someone out there that dislikes it and why. I have a suspicion that Americans and Europeans don't quite agree on what is good design.
Likely it was because it's not novel, and is fairly pedestrian. People who care about design have seen thousands like it already. For what it is it's ok.
Apple is SUCH a good example of a beautiful UI. Compare it to Dell. They are able to put you in touch with information beautifully and their search is probably the best example of live search on the net.
BTW, the admin interface for Wordpress.org by HappyCog would also mark as a great UI design (http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/wordpress-25-rc2/).