I too hated the ribbon when I first used it. When I actually used it for a while I realised that is actually an improvement over the old system, in most respects.

One area that it falls down is in the vertical screen space usage. With the old setup I would typically have a single toolbar row showing, the ribbon takes up a lot more space than that, which can be a pain on very small screens.

Thankfully I never really use Office on very small screens nowadays.

It certainly was an unusually bold change for Microsoft to make, most unlike their past very conservative approach to tweaking things one tiny bit at a time. I much more Appleish move. Of course they've made another two similar moves since with Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 (even if they've fudged it a lot in Win8).