I don't believe it's easily misunderstood; I think people just don't know how or why to create a quality implementation based on an original. The spec is actual

I don't believe it's easily misunderstood; I think people just don't know how or why to create a quality implementation based on an original. The spec is actually remarkable in the level of depth it goes to teach you not only about the design guidelines themselves, but also the reasoning and psychology behind it. Really, it's probably the best full on UX specification ever produced (and I'm not saying that lightly). It just shows that it's very difficult to get this stuff right. There's still going to be a bell curve, with most implementations and copies ending up in the mediocre middle, but overall, the guidelines might bring the quality of the overall market up. That's all we can hope.