Result is that the playhead cursor and the mouse cursor are no longer aligned.
This is indeed how it behaves. And it looks like this is not desired by many people. I’ll leave it here in bug reports even though this is probably ‘as-designed’.
Let’s see what the SB team has to say.
I can understand that, but if they “broke what was working” its really bad…By the way, if you remember, I was also lobbying the zoom with mouse behaviour prolem a year ago, and you helped me too, now that’s solved. There was a common belief that that was also by-design but turns out either they backstepped or it was indeed a “bug”…I hope they also fix this re-design or bug, whatever we call it 
The thing is, this function depends on the kind of mouse one is using, the display size, one’s work style and probably other things too.
The delay you didn’t like hasn’t changed as far as I can see, and, I find that the drag-zoom works in a more stable manner compared to before C8. The mouse departing from the cursor doesn’t really bother me, and I limit my movements to accommodate the function. That works for me for the way I work in Cubase, but not for you and some others.
Maybe this is a feature request- for the mouse cursor to stick to the playback cursor.
I think you are right…the delay is still there! maybe I got used to it
(Let’s keep this thread on topic, the mouse cursor/playhead cursor.)
I have experienced this since C8 Pro’s release and was expecting it to be addressed by the first maintenance update. I use the horizontal bar to compress/expand the arrange window a lot so it would be great to see a fix or an official explanation for it.