Yeah, it took me a while to figure out what was different, but it does really amount to less drop shadow. It's as if the old letters were stenciled on top of the clear liquid button, putting the shadow under it in a distorted, blurry configuration, pretty far separated from the text. It makes it really 3D, but harder to read.
The new version appears to have the same button (which does seem to be a vector graphic since I have yet to be able to scale it up to a point that I can see pixel doubling) just with the text under the button instead of on top. Much cleaner, no shadow. Same UI theories as using sans-serif text for screen display. Form follows function.
