The little bar is still there, you just have to Alt-Tab with the keyboard. I just got really used to the gestures.
Some of the gestures are excellent but there are other problems:
1) Keyboard shortcuts for full-screen mode are inconsistent e.g. in some apps it is Cmd-F, in some Shift-Cmd-F, in some Ctrl-Cmd-F. A quick keyboard combo is quicker than finding the resize button, and whether the button is displayed in full-screen in order to return is inconsistent as well - some apps have it, others require you to make the menu-bar appear at the top, others don't display it at all.
2) Launchpad *****. The iOS paradigm works when on a mobile device, but the gesture to bring up Launchpad is awkward, and clicking the button on the dock is pointless when I could just go over to my applications dock on the right hand side and call up the Snow Leopard style window. Also, Launchpad does not respect non-Apple subfolders inside the applications folder, so, for example, my World of Warcraft install shows all the sub-apps such as Blizzard Updater. There doesn't appear to be any way of stopping them from appearing in Launchpad either.
3) Gestures again - if you enable three-finger gestures, four fingers does the same job! But enabling four fingers only for a given task stops three-fingers working. Odd.
4) The green button for maximising the window - it still doesn't switch back and forth between maximum window size and the last non-maximum size and position. Seriously? This bug has been in every OS X version ever. Even Windows ME got this right.
5) Gestures again - the pre-Lion version of Safari was horrible - it got slower and slower and less and less stable. So I started using Chrome, which was nice and fast and used all the same Snow Leopard gestures that Safari did. Awesome. But now, those gestures no longer work - no swipes to go back and forth in your browsing history. You don't realise how much you use these gestures until they are no longer there.
A lot of Lion is excellent, and Mission Control seems to work very nicely. But seriously, there has also been change for changes sake and that is just plain stupid, and in a lot of cases seems to go against intuitive operation. It will be interesting to see the feedback developing over the next 2-3 weeks.