gizmoiscariot: Agreed. Not sure what all the hate for 4ed comes from. If you don't like it, don't play it. Its not like the previous edition's books exploded at a certain date and were not usable.
The problem is that depending how they get the books, they might not know how much they're going to hate it until they get the books, sit down with them, and find out just how limited this edition really is.
If you're lucky enough to live near a game store that has a back room or upstairs dedicated to playing games (a dying breed, those, but that's a rant for another time), then odds are good that either someone there plays 4th or the store itself runs demos. That's the best opportunity to play the game without needing the books yourself, because someone else likely already has them.
If you're just browsing in a bookstore, there's less opportunity to see the thing in action. You can read snippets and passages, but unless your bookstore is progressive and offers places where you can sit down and peruse what you want to buy, you're likely not going to capture the spirit of what makes a game good or bad.
As for why there's no love for 4th, I think it's limitation shock: 3.5 had become a hairy, unkempt, unruly man-child with many stress fractures where the added-on feats and features were causing bloat. The attempt to streamline it, give it a nice haircut, and maybe even get back to old-fashioned values (i.e. its wargaming roots) was overdone and overdone hard, to the point where I now refer to it as "the bastard child of role-playing and slot-car racing."
Counterpoint: At the risk of the "troll" moderation, those people who insist that roleplaying is impossible with 4th edition rules is doing it wrong. Roleplaying is a matter of characterization, independent of whatever structure of rules is at the table. It has more to do with imagination than the list of moves that your character can execute in combat, though they serve well as a reference for definition.