Developers don't like them because they're pushy with their proprietary stuff amongst other things.
To be honest, it's generally only nVidia fans that have much positive to say about nVidia as they are widely disliked within the industry.
How they are seen within the industry varies widely and hasn't been as positive of late as it has been in the past but for all their ups and downs they traditionally have a much better record of actually responding to requests for support and supporting products they put out there, its no coincidence that often beta drivers for mainstream and even lesser known games are released by nVidia in the weeks before a game release or on the day of release.
The days when as a game developer if you needed a fix/support for a driver feature you'd get stonewalled by AMD but have an nVidia rep within 24 hours and a development driver within a week aren't that far in the past and if you were lucky get an AMD driver to test sometime within the month after your games gone gold. (Based on real events). (EDIT: For the record this is something that AMD have massively improved on over the last 6+ months).
Their driver record is not better at all, as I said earlier, this is the third time they've released a driver package that kills cards, and the second time it's happened along side new cards being released.
Rubbish absolute rubbish, while these drivers do seem to be making a mess of things and will likely (depending on their response) put something of a stain on their track record you need to be more objective when weighing up the pros and cons, the last 2 drivers that killed cards affected a miniscule number of people and in one case only affected people who purposefully disabled the hardware limiter - in terms of the overall track record thats hardly on par with say making the vast majority of customers wait 2-3 months after a major game release before the drivers work with a game properly. (Which both companies are at times guilty of doing but AMD far more often).
For the last 7 years or so I've live with a bunch of people who I guess you could call IT professionals, CCNP qualified, etc. work in 2nd/3rd line support and so on, one does IT for the NHS another works for a big ISP, etc. I mention this as it reduces the potential for driver issues to be user error as by the nature of their jobs driver troubleshooting is something they are used to... over the years they've had various nVidia and AMD setups including more recently 5870s, 69xx CF, 7950s, etc. most of them are now on 660s and 660tis due to having many more issues over the years with AMD cards than when they've had nVidia setups, even tho neither is flawless... so I find it extremely hard to take some of the comments people make on here seriously based on real experience.
User interface is not part of the drivers, it's the control panel. Their control panel is certainly more polished but it isn't the same as the drivers.
As I said software support... when judging "drivers" you need to look at the whole support package.
