iTunes 11 is not a good piece of software. In many places it has made organising your music/media collection a pain for anyone who owns more than a couple hundred of songs. Apple has been rightly criticised for improving an already mediocre product for the worse.
iTunes's purpose is to serve mainly as a gateway for the user's content, in this case letting you import CDs to put them on your iDevice(s) — and if you really like Apple, you can then push your ripped CDs to iTunes Match so they can live happily on a fluffy cloud with all the music you've bought from Apple directly.
With that in mind, here's something Apple did well in iTunes 11:
The user interface and workflow for importing CDs has actually been improved.
Apple has made it very easy to edit information for the entire CD as well as download and upload (!) CD information to Gracenote's CD-database.
But the biggest boon is the application asking how to encode the CD each time the 'Import CD' button is pressed. In previous versions you had to open the application preferences each time before importing a CD if you wanted to use a different encoder.
If you have a lot of CDs to import, being able to quickly choose whether to import a CD using the Apple Lossless encoder (for complex music, such as orchestral recordings) or the AAC encoder (for less complex music like pop) can be very helpful.
