Well, the report is wrong and the epilogue is in.

It's hard to tell without seing the actual movie. I get the feeling it could look weird with the tone taken by the films, but then I found Yates' argument for keeping it in (I read that article after writing my first post) quite convincing (it echoes a bit what I was saying... it's a good way to show the cycle of life is back to normal and it's important to do so etc. - and the scenes are very emotional). The ending is fast-paced and exilarating, possibly the scene will be welcome at the end of the battle too (personally I felt it was so, in the book. I would have hated it if Rowling ended it all in the Hall right after the battle). There are some things about Yates's direction I don't care for much (I think he chose to render visually the darkening mood of the books half-succesful at best. Rowling managed much better to show the same without getting rid of nearly everything whimsical and weird about Hogwarts and wizards.. Yates simply got rid of moving pictures, ghosts, feasts, banners and showed a suddenly very austere, dark school etc. It's like he gave all the sets the gloom of Grimmauld Place... which, perhaps for this reason) he didn't manage to make creepy enough to stand out beside the rest., but he remains way better than the previous directors (with Cuaron), especially with the characters. My major gripe may be that he broke with the books's tradition and got rid of the Dursleys in HBP. The movies actually got rid of the three best Dursleys's scenes, IMO (their meeting with the Weasleys, the scene with them and Dumbledore, and the last moment between Harry and Dudley which really was a shame to cut...).

It's not surprising the subtleties are in DH part 1. Yates had the screentime to be far more faithful to the book, and he seems to have caught that this time around if he didn't make it mostly about characters and their relationships, he wouldn't have a movie. Rowling in interviews seems to agree, and says she's very happy how he dealt with things that were fundamental to her, for instance Snape's backstory (which I guess finally explains why Yates decided to cut Lily from HBP flashbacks...in the movie I guess it will come as a surprise that she was there and why. The HP movies have always been extremely economical about exposition and foreshadowing. This stuff is great in books, but in movies they just clutter things up. Showing stuff like the fact Lily defended Snape, or the medallion at Grimmauld Place was great in the book, but would have added nothing to the HBP movie (Rowling also had many twists and turns to muddle things up, but Yates had to be more circumspect if he wanted the movie audience to believe Snape truly is a villain). I just miss quite a bit the subtle hints that Snape ended his occlumency lessons with Harry not because of his indiscretion with the pensieve as such but because Harry did something he could not forgive by spying on his memories, and it would be to eventually give access to Voldemort to memories that would ruin Snape's mission and possibility of redemption.. I think it was a bad call to change that to Harry piercing Snape's defenses by accident(and it doesn't make much sense that Harry could if Snape can resist Voldemort's probes...). I think the way Rowling did it, with Snape giving Harry the memory he had started to watch once it didn't matter anymore worked much better. But it's been a trend with the movies to trivialize the mistakes made in the series by the trio, or their character flaws. Before DH, they most of the time didn't make screentime for stuff like this. The relationship of Ron and Harry was greatly simplified, for instance. Ron's attitude in DH 1 came almost out of the blue, for instance.