I'm going to come down squarely on the side of "people aren't seeing the importance of the under-the-hood" changes. NFC will literally change the way we check in to places, shop, spend money (note those aren't identical), and share information with others...it just won't be obvious for much of the next year. Likewise, the work they did to expand the API to expose stuff for gaming and media content is laying the groundwork for major advances (/cough Playstation phone and Google Music), and their support of built in VOIP stacks and native video chat support will become huge in the next 6-12 months.
I suppose in a way people may never appreciate it, since outside of the music and gaming products we'll see in the next couple months (which themselves may be seen as separate projects) the other items won't come to fruition for end users until after Honeycomb is out, Still, getting them ready now so developers and major business partners can start to implement these large-scale changes to how we use mobile devices was a major undertaking. Honeycomb may have all the flash and sex appeal, but Gingerbread is absolutely huge in terms of building infrastructure for the long term.