I'm posing this as a question because I'd definitely be open to hearing other people's viewpoints on this. I'll state my own view below.
While everyone else was cheering at the possibility of upgrading their gear, I basically read the announcement as "Here, have a piece of gear 8 ilvls below what it is supposed to be. Justify the repetition of dailies and raids you don't need to be doing anymore to earn points, so you can get that gear up to its proper item level".
Basically, I look at every kind of non-optional gear upgrading such as gemming and enchanting as basically the same thing, i.e. bringing the gear up to the level intended by the developers when they tune things. However like most people I don't actually have much of a problem with this, because they are compelling enough that I recognise that the lack of these things would actually detract from the "interestingness" of gearing.
On the flipside however, gear ilvl upgrades were just too blatant and arbitrary without adding any "fun" to the game. Now it's going on holiday, I personally hope it's gone and stays gone... But what about you? Did you enjoy it, and if so why?