Is Amazon doing an alta vista?

The US version of Amazon just gets more and more crowded. Here is a typical page for a music CD as rendered on a laptop screen (1024x768, with some indication of paging) - now, how do I find out whether I want to buy this album? Turns out I have to scroll down three or more pages to see anything resembling a description or review:

First page: album and artist, image, price, and "buy now" button (inside the ugly green line). The rest is other stuff Amazon suggests I should buy, things I've looked at in the past, lots of links to other stores, etc.
Second page: other stuff Amazon thinks I should buy.
Third page: rating (stars out of five), tracklist, editorial review.
Fourth page: user reviews.

The customer experience is about the whole customer journey from how users end up at the site, how they find and researching stuff of interest, to making a purchasing decision, etc. Success requires an "unbroken chain" of interactions. The current design has too many places where the user can fall off.

I personally buy more books from Indigo/Chapters these days, it's cheaper and I think it arrives faster - so (for me at least) Amazon are failing at the purchase decision point (do they even realize that checking prices on other sites has become part of my customer journey?). Now they are also starting to fail at the research stage (the "I want it" point) - there is too much stuff to distract me.

It reminds me of how alta vista, from being the most successful search engine, turned into a bloated advertisement/portal with a search box, followed by extinction once Google turned up. Altavista now looks like a google clone, or maybe the advertisers just left? (OK, they do still have advertising - sponsored links take up the first page of search results)

UPDATE: Oh damn, Jacob Nielsen said all of this already.