That does seem to be the case for me too about the unlock vibration which is nice. I'm not sure I would have noticed it for a while if you didn't mention it though. The other thing I noticed is I no longer have blue status icons and time to match my blue side buttons. Oh well! I guess they figure the white is easier to see but I was thinking the blue was cool.
My GSam crashed on me after the update and I uninstalled it. I read it can't access battery info anymore with 4.4. I liked looking at the temp graph.