At first I figured vulkan would be "just another api" but the more I read about it the more I like it. Having lower-level access to the hardware and a smaller API surface are both awesome benefits, though the external sync stuff looks a bit finicky (at a glance).
That said, the bigger problem (at least in my case) is lack of api/driver support, especially for OS X. While the API may be rad, if I can't use it, I won't 
As far as I have seen in the samplecodes, it's truly "bare-to-metal", you have to do the most things that GL/DX abstracted for you, manually.
Like uploading a texture to GPU Mem. You'll have to query the card for the formats it's accept, query the card for memory availabe, reserve it and at last you can upload the texture. Sure there will be, in some time, libraries that abstract this stuff, but I think that the lowlevel freaks here will surely have their fun =).
Apple decided to push Metal on their platforms but I'm sure they will support Vulkan sooner or later.
