It's not really confusing, though.
The device is designed to be people centric.. all of your social notifications (someone replies to a post you make, someone mentions you in a tweet, etc.) are all in a central location under the "me" tile. By default, this is pinned to the first screen on the phone after you add your accounts to the device and it updates with new notifications.
I keep mine pinned at the very top of my start page.. I can go there and see all of my social notifications, update my status on facebook, see everything I've posted recently to any of the supported social networks, etc. For me, that stuff is a tap and a couple of swipes away.
If you want to see what other people have been up to, you look at their contact entry and the "what's new" section.
It's no more confusing than opening the facebook application and looking at your own wall or a friends' wall from there.
This is simply a case of not knowing how to use the device properly.
It took me awhile personally of always loading up the Facebook app to check out my feed or having notification settings on on various twitter applications when I realized I was just being redundant when I already had my ME tile alerting me fairly well of twitter DMs/retweets, and facebook notifications. It's quicker to use the ME tile by far than opening up to each individual app. I rarely use the Facebook app anymore, but if I need any sort of deeper functionality that I'm not getting on the ME tile, I'll pop it open. But for 99% of the time with the functionality I need, the ME tile works perfectly. Anyone who is simply messing around with the phone for a review or just testing it out, without any intention of keeping it as their main driver, especially coming from iPhone/Android, could easily skip over using the ME tile and going with the methods they're used to, opening up each app up to do whatever each app does, and in so doing, misses out on one of the things that make Windows Phones very very good at social networking.
I feel like the platform is sort of becoming, for better lack of a term, teenager in its evolution. Still young, still growing, sort of quirky, still learning how its going to make it, and when compared to more mature platforms, lacking. Seems there's at least enough early adopters for WP that bloggers can give it a hard time and score some nice hits. Just wish they'd actually learn the platform well enough to know its quirks and what the best methods of using the phone and its apps on a daily basis are, so that when they level a complaint, that it's well reasoned, and knowledgeable enough not come off as completely ignorant, as well as finely tuned enough to actually put some heat on MS to highlight areas they can honestly do better.
The one complaint the Giz editorial gave that was more or less legitimate was how many Windows Phone apps often pale in comparison to their iOS/Android cousins. The only real way to improve that situation is either money-hatting devs, or gaining marketshare and...APOLLO. Though then again, the devs that have really tackled the metro design language in their WP7 apps ended up with apps that in many ways exceed their iPhone/Android cousins. Depends on the devs, but with more pull, and more users, MS can have better leverage to pull and move devs in line with the latest features available in the OS/dev tools.
