This is another step toward confirming my hypothesis: Google didn't kill Reader because they wanted to stop providing a feed-reader; Google killed Reader because RSS is a knock-off version of email. You can subscribe to regular updates on a topic over both RSS and email, but the updates that actually get read are the ones that hit your email inbox.
So, gradually, Google are transforming Gmail into a capable feed-reader. First they added the auto-categories; now they're rearranging everything into a single chronological feed.
I was an avid Google Reader but then moved to Feedly when they suicided it. After I deleted my Google Account, as one of the side-affects was losing access to my Feedly account because I signed up using Google Outh, I had to look for alternatives.
I then realised that I was looking at the problem all wrong. Really, all I wanted was an RSS-to-email application. As a joke I did an "apt-cache search rss2email". I found "rss2email" and so I installed it. I've never looked back.
As a side note I had to smile when I was looking at the man page for r2e after seeing who the author was.
I don't treat RSS like that, sometimes I'm too busy and don't check my RSS feeds and when I do I won't "catch up". I use email subscription to websites that I want to read every post.
Yes, and you use email subscriptions that way because email clients are bad at being feed readers: they effectively force you to "catch up" whenever you open them.
My point was that, with these changes, Google are making Gmail good at being a feed-reader--adding features to interact with subscription emails the way you currently interact with RSS feed items.
If your email client is good at being a feed reader, it will be sensible to use email subscriptions for things you currently use RSS feeds for.
On #1: They might remove Hangouts from Gmail-on-Chrome if they planned to integrate them directly into Chrome/ChromiumOS. More likely, though, is that that button in the top-right corner isn't a drop-down, but rather represents a currently-collapsed Hangouts sidebar. That sidebar is probably expanded by default, like Facebook's.
On #2: it's well known that people have a bad experience reading extremely long (i.e. more than ~65em) lines of text. It's actually better to wrap a subject line onto several lines than to let it go on all the way across your 2560px screen. Ideally, web pages could just specify a maximum width you could stretch the browser out to. But, since they can't, they drop in some useless whitespace.
I'm not one to hate on redesigns - I can't think of the last redesign that I didn't like but if this ships, or anything close to this ships I can categorically say that I will stop using the gmail web interface.
So, gradually, Google are transforming Gmail into a capable feed-reader. First they added the auto-categories; now they're rearranging everything into a single chronological feed.