I installed the proprietary nvidia drivers from synaptic as in past
releases, no problem. The surprising thing is that the proprietary
nvidia drivers were available for an alpha release.

For nvidia cards, the default driver has *always* been the unaccelerated
nv driver. If you wanted hardware accelerated 3D support, you had to
choose the proprietary nvidia driver.

Making nouveau the default, rather than the bare-bones, unaccelerated nv
driver seems like a win to me, since the nouveau driver does have more
capability than the nv, and it is being actively improved as time goes by.

So, I guess I don't understand what you're saying - how is it any worse
to have nouveau as the default, rather than nv? The steps to activate
the proprietary nvidia driver are the same as before.