A smokescreen no doubt, but a potentially awesome one

I'll let you read it for yourself. This is very light on details, but extracting all the fluff is somewhat promising, but also packs a lot of uncertainty.

1. A good chunk of each talent tree is now tied up in a single point instead of distributed. You pick that first Destruction point and with it you gain your mastery bonuses, one of your defining talents (My assumptions are conflag, felguard, and either UA or haunt respectively). It also includes %damage boosts (wrapping up talents like Emberstorm and Shadow Mastery directly into the spec choice) and some key passive talents from the tree. The example given is Anger Management being built into that first Arms point. For warlocks, it's hard to say what might be included. Perhaps Fire and Brimstone, Demonic Knowledge, and Everlasting Affliction.
2. It sounds like that specialization also unlocks tree-defining core spells at level 10 rather than their normally trained level. Main thrust here is probably destruction warlocks getting incinerate instead of being a shadow spec until level 64 and then suddenly being fire.
3. The third mastery bonus is not part of your spec, but gained at level 75, after which mastery from gear will contribute to it.
4. There's about a third less talents, 41 instead of 76, but they're budgeted higher. Everything that's there is supposed to still be there somehow. We already knew some of it would be wrapped up in Mastery, and now some more will be piled into your initial specialization pick.
5. Your secondary trees are only available after spending your 31 point talent. For leveling, this is generally recommended for many (though not all!) classes anyway, and at level 85 it means fairly little, since almost no ideal specs ignore their bottom talent as it is.

Hit the break for my thoughts.

Like I said, there's a LOT of uncertainty built into the system, a lot will depend on actually laying hands on the system. As described, it's almost exclusively a leveling change. If you already have all your talent points, you've got your full spec as it is, it doesn't really make that much difference if you get it in 41 points or 76 if you get it.

On the surface, it does immediately look like a drastic reduction in options... but as anyone who follows serious theorycraft knows there's not many options as it is. Even somebody with no clue throwing together an awful spec will hit a lot of the same talents as the cookie cutter because a lot of those talents are just such obvious picks - 15% boost to everything you're doing for 5 points? Duh. 10% to two of your major spells on top of it? Win. Nobody passes on that stuff. There's less than 41 points worth of talents where you can look at think "Hm... it's not immediately obvious which is better" right now. More like 5-10 in most specs. And a lot of the choice is in the fact that our talent trees are very unfocused as they currently exist. I just have a hard time seeing it as losing options when the options you're losing were bad.

Like I said, this seems a profound change for the leveling warlock Level 10 should represent a substantial jump in player power, and you'll be a fairly functional hero at that level. That sounds pretty damn fun, and definitely means I'm shelving my current sub-60 alts for leveling in Cataclysm. It would be very easy to overdo this so there's too little feeling of progress after that sudden explosion at level 10, but there's still a lot of stuff in our spellbooks that isn't critical to making our specs functional out of the box.

Lastly... this is a smokescreen announcement. I'm sure it escaped nobody's notice that this huge announcement came at the height of the Real ID stuff, while multiple CMs have vanished and one unfortunate sod is probably in court petitioning to have his name legally changed as we speak.

I'm reserved, but I still think this is an awesome smokescreen.