Nowadays intuitive is a lot more of "what mental models and user behaviour the users already know of and therefore would want to reutilize" than "give this design to a tabula rasa mind and see if he learns to use this".

Not saying if this is good or bad, but asking "whether this UI is intuitive" is more like asking whether this UI follows known patterns or not. In theory I could design something really "intuitive" but because it would be very much different from what are the currently known user patterns, there would be a strong initial feeling of "non-intuitiveness", because it differs from the norm.

Then again, designs like these do prove themselves or not over the longer term of use.