WTF? My shit just morphed into this layout after doing a couple of searches. Where do I go back to the plain old settings?

Same. Wonder how many shades of gray they tested for that. It's pretty jarring, but it's not as bad as some of the other colors I normally use in my ads. Going to try it out and see how it does just for kicks.Official Google Blog: Evolving the Google design and experience
I personally think the new UI is a million times better than the old.
Awesome find! I need to read more Wired.Someone said:
The parts announced Tuesday represent only a portion of Google’s plans. In an approach the company refers to as “rolling thunder,” Google has been quietly been pushing out pieces of its ambitious social strategy — there are well over 100 launches on its calendar. When some launches were greeted by yawns, the Emerald Sea team leaders weren’t ruffled at all — lack of drama is part of the plan. Google has consciously refrained from contextualizing those products into its overall strategy.
Another twist is that people in your circles don’t have to be members of Google’s social net. If Aunt Mary refuses to opt in, you can include her anyway, and she can still get the pictures you post to the circle via e-mail.
In this feature, users type in subjects of personal interest — “sparks.” Then Google streams items about that subject. The content that Google pulls into your Sparks stream is different from the results you’d get if you put the same term into the search engine.
“It’s focused on getting stuff that’s fresh and social and fun. We’ve tried to tune parameters to get something that’s engaging,” says Andrew Tomkins, a top search engineer who joined Google after stints at IBM and Yahoo. The signals that Google looks for in determining Sparks content is freshness, a visual component — videos will rank highly — and the degree to which the content is virally spreading on the net. (Tellingly, the Google News group has moved into the Emerald Sea division.) In other words, Sparks tries to deliver the kinds of thing you want to share with others, and Google hopes that its users do just that.
Awesome find! I need to read more Wired.
This is easily the most revealing article on Google's future plans ever written.
For the TL;DR crowd:
This was a LONG article because it really revealed a lot. Google is going to be your Social provider soon whether you like it or not!
In short, google+ is not "just one more tool." -It is in fact one of over 100 tools that will Completely replace all of the tools you know as google today!
It also gave the history of Google & social and shows in depth many of the upcoming changes... Even specific things like this:
And for SEOs like myself, we now have to consider Sparks:
If you care about SEO or Social's future in your job, drop everything and go read that wired piece right now. It will change the way you see google v/s facebook at the very least.