Yeap, the marketing focus on the updates is a huge disappointment. That is especially true when you consider that the ereading experience is woefully incomplete if you use books from other sources. The lack of support for Adobe's DRM (e.g. for library books) and PDF out of the box is terrible, both from the perspective of novices who don't know how to install 3rd party apps and from the perspective of readers who want a single collection rather than a separate collection for each app.

That being said, I don't think that the update makes the Vox any worse. The advertising laden widget can be removed or replaced with one of the two other widgets that Kobo provides and you can opt out of the "social reading" experience. If worse comes to worse, you can also use third-party reader software.