Do styled form elements look less interacty?

I genuinely love the new BBCi search facility. I think the design is elegant – the large tabs are simple but really really obvious and functional, and the whole layout is easy on the eyes and clear. The only thing I don’t like is the search box itself. Weirdly, styled the way it has been, it is less obvious to me on the page. It looks a certain amount more graphic-like, and a certain amount less like a piece of browser functionality… Interestingly this is less the case on a browser like Chimera on OSX, which automatically anti-aliases all the text on the page…