A global portal is a fine idea; has been for many moons. But why in the world did this change happen with such little notice?
I've been largely offline for the past week, and didn't see the initial conversation; afaict the idea of a portal seems to have gone from suggestion on wikipedia-l to reality in the span of a day, without notice on the en wikipedia.
It was not at all urgent, and the sudden change breaks the usability of existing links and shortcuts [though I'd heard a portal was being set up, this is how I found out just now that the portal is still English-centric, hard to navigate, and slow to load].
I wish everyone had waited to implement this until the portal were more usable and better announced, and redirection policy better discussed. But perhaps noone else noticed...
+sj+
(For instance, I think anyone coming form a US or UK IP with browser-lang set to English should still get redirected to the en: main page, perhaps with a visible line atop the current page-layout with links to the portal and a language dropdown... this will help a vast # of visitors who hit [www.]wikipedia.org)