I hope they listen to their customers and take it back to how it was.
If Apple "listened to their customers", they would be Blackberry. Focus groups of existing customers are almost always wrong, and it's very rare for a new release of anything, especially one which changes user interface elements, to be welcomed by the existing customer base, who are inherently conservative. Innovation always results in people shouting that they liked it the way it was, thank you, but there's endless history of that simply being wrong.
Steve Ballmer (Microsoft's CEO) signed his long-term death warrant when he uttered the immortal lines "There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance." and "“$500, fully subsidized, with a plan! That is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers, because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine.”"
Ballmer's certainly not an idiot, and his view on phone UI was very common at the time. Even today, there's a small but vociferous minority who bang on about Blackberries being "more professional" and "about business" and so on: it's reasonable to assume, however, that a company that in twelve months will have reduced its workforce by two thirds is not in good health. Its share price today is about 4% of its share price five years ago: holding on to its existing markets and customers and trying to keep them happy has destroyed 96% of the company's value. Why would Apple want to emulate that?
The iPhone 5S and 5C ship with iOS7 and won't run anything prior to that: they're shipping in vast volume and flying out of the shops. The original iOS look and feel was getting pretty long in the tooth, so if a tiny minority of existing customers (ie, people who have already paid) either don't upgrade or, an even tinier minority, go elsewhere, that's just the price of doing business.