Oh, how interesting. I didn't even notice that, it felt very intuitive.
I think it has to do with the fact that I strongly anchor the board in terms of "down", and all pieces are moving "down" even if I happen to have the view turned. It's funny because having the arrows change meaning with the view is at once intuitive and confusing to me. It's not that the game flunked me; I made it through a few levels before getting bored. I think it was intuitive when I was just moving stuff around, and confusing when I was trying to plan things out (and therefore the notion of "down", "left", "right" starts creeping back in). Kinda funny how the brain works…
Hmm. Every single screw up I had was from mixing up spacebar and enter for drop and rotate over and over again. Apparently I don't interface well with keyboard-driven tetris. :)