In particular, I like that I can just type whatever I want as a status message instead of Facebook deciding that my message should be 'XYZ is <fill in>".
Yeah, but you still had to start it with your name, and it's really difficult to make correct sentences that start with your name in some languages (it can even be difficult in English depending on what you're trying to say).
You can tell that this update had a lot to do with simplifying localisation, in fact. A lot of text is gone. Instead of saying that someone was "tagged in 4 photos", it just says their name and shows the photos.
For what it's worth, that was the one thing I really liked about the Facebook status messages -- the last bastion of the old IRC /me command.
Somehow, having your name at the start of the textbox (and not being able to erase it) seemed to force status updates to be terse and, well, third-person. I've noticed that just in the last few days, this beautiful brevity has completely disappeared.
[Edit: but I concede that it probably didn't work so well for other languages...]
In particular, I like that I can just type whatever I want as a status message instead of Facebook deciding that my message should be 'XYZ is <fill in>".