I love Manchester, but this is a fair assessment.
The actual, viable city area has been really small until the last 10-15 years, when it started swallowing up the former industrial areas. That expansion has picked up the pace a lot in the last few years, though, and Ancoats seems to have been subsumed into the "cool" part of the city in the blink of an eye. The new construction is also a bit of a mixed bag so far; as well as being pretty disruptive, areas like Spinningfields aren't really becoming 'destinations,' or at least not for the people I know. Solicitors who work in Hardman Square will go to The Ivy et al, but I've never personally made a trip from outside Spinningfields to go there. There are much better options.
For whatever reason, the parts of Manchester people see first, when they visit by train, are still the worst. The area immediately around Piccadilly Station is still grungy as hell - not in a good way - and Piccadilly Gardens is an absolute hellscape on a weekend night. I don't want the city to lose its rough edge, but on the other hand a tourist doesn't have to walk more than a couple of minutes in the wrong direction to get a bad impression. There's definitely work to be done there. And that's without mentioning that the airport is undergoing a long-overdue but massively disruptive regeneration as well. To arrive in Manchester as a tourist is to see a city in a state of flux.
I think Manchester's going to be an absolutely amazing place by the time my kids (currently 5 and 2) are old enough to start going into the city with friends, but there have definitely been some missteps in terms of how to grow the city without losing its character. It's going in the right direction now, but it's taken a while.
I don't mean that to sound too harsh, though. Manchester is still the second-best city in the UK, although Edinburgh is close (and it's criminal that it's not on the list at all). I lived in the centre for almost a decade, and I still love driving in to meet friends there, even though I live a good 40 minutes' drive outside these days.