The TTT will be interesting for the major contenders - if Cancellara goes to BMC, then Evans will have a very strong TTT (Evans, Cancellara, Hincapie, Bookwalter), but if not and Cancellara goes to Team Luxomburg with the Schlecks instead, then it will probably hurt Evans and BMC will be another TTT also-ran.
Vandevelde is part of a gun TTT unit at Garmin as well (Zabriskie, Millar, Vandevelde, etc, plus Bobridge, Cam Meyer will be handy once they get another few years).
Due to a TTT, guys like Roche will get COMPLETELY burnt, especially in a French side packed mainly with breakaway specialists plus one or two climbing domestiques. Van den Broeck at Omega Pharma-Lotto is another who will get burnt pretty badly (especially as Lotto will be packed with support now for Andre Griepel), and same with Samu Sanchez at Euskatel (who will be packed largely with climbers who can't TT to save their life). Also, a TTT favours Radioshack, a team I really don't like.
But agree, not the biggest fan of a TTT. I much prefer the small TT prologue (< 10km), followed by a shorter TT (~25km) at the end of the first week, and a longer TT later.
The problem is the first week of the TdF is generally pretty boring. They need different stages to break it up, like the cobbled stage this year, or stages like an Ardennes classic - again this year (until a motorcycle crashed and left oil all over the road). If you get riders like Gilbert going, you know they will attack and animate the Ardennes-like stages so they can take the leaders jersey in the first week, which makes for more exciting racing than the repeated catch the breakaway at 10km for the bunch sprint.