It's something that I found quite handy because a) it gave you somewhere to stow pages away for future reference, and b) it was a place to bring them to other's attention if they really needed something done and you didn't know enough to do it.
I also kind of miss the convenience of having a 'delete' button next to each page on the stub list... it made the cleaning up process a lot faster and a lot less tedious because you didn't have to keep backtracking quite so much.
And finally I miss the list of 'reciprocal links' on the 'what links here' pages.
But I like the list of orphaned images, and I REALLY like how blindingly fast it is to upload a photo and to link it into an article! And now the wikipedia keeps working all the time instead of only 12 hours a day :)
PS. I miss having my shortcut bar on the righthand side of the page too, but I'm getting used to the change. I realised WHY I liked it there - I use the random page button a lot and it was that much closer to the scrollbar on the righthand side of the page so it saved a little extra movement when I was browsing.