The point is that a disturbingly low amount of users know that they can search directly from the omnibox. The new tab page is designed to show users that the omnibar is Google search. Potentially they can save bandwidth, since people will use the bar instead of going to Google.com, which itself has no ads (whereas the result pages do).
Yes, it is sort of punishing users who know what they're doing. I personally think it's too simple and would have liked something more similar to the old page, but I'm just explaining why they did this.

you can no longer go back to the old tabs page, what you can do is set Bing as your default search engine, that gets rid of the giant search box on the New Tab page and looks quite similar to the old page. Also it will send a collective 'fuck you' message to google if enough people do this, so perhaps they might consider removing this 'feature' in future.
To change this: Go into Settings, scroll down to 'Search' and select 'Bing'