I welcome the changes:
I think the idea of more tiers is a good one, and will make for better competition within each tier. This is the best part of the update, imho (I am presuming that there will be competitions that are tier-dependant, i.e. in some competitions, masters will only be competing against masters, tour master against tour masters, etc).
The new aspect of Levels could be really good, depending on how they work in combination with the new Tier system; if they are thought-out how I think they might be, there will be some aspect of them that will discourage sandbagging, at least that is my hope. If this is the case, it will reduce any advantage others here have pointed out; that some sandbagging pros would get advantage over masters due to having access to the same equipment but playing from pro tees. I do see that this could be a problem, it depends on what it will take for pros to get the Levels to obtain what is currently master equipment; I would expect that this has been thought of by the development team, though, at least I hope so : ).
I can see that some aspects of the new Levels will most likely discourage players from disconnecting from multiplayer games; at the least they will give people an idea if how people play their multiplayer games. Almost like a 'reputation' rating that has been discussed before.
It seems like the whole update has been though out carefully, and I reckon they will have quite a lot of depth, and be quite complex in how they operate, adding a lot of new aspects to the game.
I'm looking forward to seeing how these work out in practice.
Valrec