IMO.... I think Apply got comfortable in their spot with having the #1 smartphone for so long they allowed the competition to take over. Maybe this overhaul is what's needed. Plus the maps fiasco didnt help. It was a wake up call to change to take over as the leading smartphone once again
If you think Apple got "taken over" you clearly haven't tried the competition. I have, and rest assured its still is the leading cellphone in pretty much any metric. (Esp. the most important one: User satisfaction.)
While it will remain the premium and leading smartphone, at least in the near term, will it lose its spot as the most common smartphone platform and market share? Sure. That's just the nature of the beast when you make a 600$ product. The people that don't care that much about a smartphone will usually get the 149$ Android cheapie.
(All statistics also show that those cheap Android smartphones don't really get used as Smartphones.)
Anyways, nobody really knows what IOS 7 will look like. Even most of the people working on it don't really know what the finished product will look like.
They'll make some adjustments to the visuals, but nothing too drastic like "a flat UI".
(Keep in mind, there are people whose jobs literally depend on making/making up Apple news)
Cause really iOS is fine as it is for the most part. It's not "tired" or "old" it's familiar. And most importantly, it works fine.
I think Apple are way too smart to come up with change just for changes sake. And six years isn't much for a good UI. Windows was fundamentally unchanged for 20 years. The way a car is setup has been mostly unchanged for almost a hundred years. Why drop it, if it works?