With every update there is some bad and some good...
The new items are great! Shields take damage and it also opens up to new game ideas. Same thing with being able to fly on a glider. Although I see the arrows as a waste of space. Shooting a healing arrow will only help kill a zombie, which there aren't that many. The discussion of the rebalancing has already been discussed for 1.9.1, so hopefully that will help out with items.
The new mob, Shulker, is kind of "unnecessary". Levitation is not really helping with plugins trying to keep players from using fly clients.
Cool new blocks, still can't use them to build because of their unusual texture...
Overall... The new update is good. New things means new ways to play Minecraft