I disagree. Wikipedia is a similar effort, and yet they have a highly polished look. I agree with the fact that OSM doesn't look as nice as GMaps, and I also agree that a better color/font scheme needs to be implemented if they want 7 billion users.
I don't know if I'd agree that Wikipedia has a highly polished look, but my point was more that you can have multiple polished looks, and it's actually easier to have a polished Linux for mobile phones and a seperate polished Linux for server usage (and so on), than to try to be all things to everyone. Wikipedia for example has multiple skins, multiple clients (including totally offline ones, similar to one of OSMs key differentiators).
And this article is the equivalent of say, Canonical taking Debian and saying they're going to make an easy to use desktop linux from it. It will almost certainly be more "polished" and end-user focused than openstreetmap.org, because they serve two different types of users.
Interestingly Wikipedia are actually a user facing front-end for OpenStreetmap data, in fact they have at least 4 projects using slightly different tech to put different front-ends on OSM as appropriate for their usage, e.g. the official Android app uses MapQuest OSM tiles to show articles that relate to your physical surroundings:
Again, not always what I'd call polished, but they're making creative use of map data, rather than putting some pins on Google Maps (or on an OSM based clone) and that's a good thing.
