Huge relief. Although it took most of the weekend, all four devices have now updated - the iPhone and Watch took all Friday evening, then the iPad Air 2 took all Saturday to Backup to the Cloud and this morning it has updated successfully. The older iPad Mini 2 was updated earlier as a test before risking the three current devices.
A very tense time, but all went through without any problems. The Watch did spend a long time verifying before installing but it went ahead eventually.
So far, the Find Friends app has come back out of the folder and the Newsstand seems to stay out on the Home screen now, plus the keyboard is harder to read (although more accurate in a way) with the lower-case letters. Apart from that nothing much seems changed. Not keen on the new way of viewing currently loaded apps. Is it my imagination or did the folders have 3 apps on a line before compared with 4 per line now?
Incidentally, the iPad seems to have updated without unloading the apps I had loaded - which is pretty impressive