Will it “register”?
My enthusiasm for LR3-Beta's new import dialog box is, as I responded here, best described as “complete indifference”, so see Richard Earney and Wade Heninger for opinions on the new experience.
One opportunity Adobe have lost (though it's not too late) is a semantic one - change its name from “import” to “register”. It's a small change, but as Laura Shoe says in When Words Fail Us it's an important one:
My Honda was made in Japan and imported into the U.S…. When this happened, it physically left Japan and entered the U.S…. Similarly, when we export Chrystlers to China (do we?), they physically leave the U.S. and enter China.
However, when you import images into Lightroom, you are not moving your images into Lightroom. This trips up so many users - it is not uncommon for newer users to import their images into LR, and then delete them from their hard drives - and then they wonder why they have question marks all over their folders and images. Users also often think that because they back up their LR catalog when prompted, and their images are in the catalog, that no further backup of their images is needed. Of course when their hard drive containing their images fails, they realize otherwise.
It's not cut and dried, because when you “import” off a flash card you are moving the files, but for a lot of users the word “register” might make them think - never a bad thing.