Thanks for the feedback guys.
Adding an “album cover view” to Now Playing should be reasonably straightforward – we’re already working on some designs, so look for that in a future release soon.
During alpha testing we actually increased the size of the album cover on Now Playing at least twice, but from what I can recall we didn’t get tons of feedback like this-- there seems to be a perception that what you’re seeing in Now Playing today won’t change or expand in the future, and I just want to be clear that nothing could be further from the truth.
We really see the current Now Playing offering as just the start of what’s possible here – there’s so many ways we want to enable discovery and exploration using the current track as a starting point, and this screen was intentionally designed so that we can continue to add functionality, and everyone can customize and get what they want.
So consider “album view” as “on the roadmap” 
and head over to feature-requests to let us know what else you might be interested in seeing here.
And again, thanks for all the feedback guys!