In all honesty, that's not that bad an analogy. It's not a complete abandonment of all the tropes that got the genre to where is now, but almost every individual element has been tweaked for the better and there are a lot of interesting new ideas to keep me coming back. It's also more accessible for people who aren't genre-savvy.
Actually....... maybe :X Don't tell anybody. I played about 50-50% M+K/gamepad last night, and for me there's not an obvious winner. At the least a pad didn't feel like a liability. The free running feels amazing with a 360 pad, and a lot of the time thinking about headshot precision isn't even in my top 3 concerns during a match. I'm no sniper, though.
edit: my pedigree:
Doom, Quake, Unreal, Goldeneye at friends' houses (no 64 :'(), lots and LOTS of Quake 3 Arena, Halo, BF1942, UT2004, LOTS and lots of Halo 2. A bit of Bad Company 2. The CoD/Modern Warfare wave just totally passed me by, I've played maybe 2 hours of all the games in that lineage combined.