This is probably only good for people who already have good spatial reasoning and can make the transformation on the fly from screen orientation to what you're seeing ahead of you. Many people have poor spatial reasoning skills though, and probably find the direct view more useful.
I don't think of myself as having good spatial reasoning, but it still works for me — note that if you look at the top part of the UI (in the grey box covering the map), the arrows are still relative to "you". So at least in the first few days of trying out this orientation, one could just rely on the arrows for turns, and use the rest of the map only to reinforce/build their spatial transformation (rotation) skills.
