Other areas of the OS already have this, such as Dolphin. It would make things more consistent and would also add a bit of elegancy to Kickoff.
We used to have this but removed it because it made Kickoff feel slow and laggy. We experimented with making the animation duration very short but then it was so short that it looked like no animation at all. In the end removing the animations was really the only way to avoid the feeling of lagginess.