It must depend what you cook. I don't do fried, spitty type dishes and the grout around the largish tiles in my now 10 year old kitchen is as good as new. I rubbed car wax into the freshly laid grout lines, same as I did in the bathroom. It also depends on how much light bounces around your kitchen, glass being so reflective shows up smears with light on it. Just above the kettle in the first photo is a good example. Each to their own, I'm a non-glass girl whenever I can get away with it.

Rellish, did you have trouble getting matching grout and silicone? We're about to use the exact same tile in our bathroom. Also, did the tiler have any trouble due to the embossed pattern? Our builder thinks we need to install the tiles on top of the vanity as the tiles are not flat and it will be difficult to get a good, clean seal if the wall is tiled first.

We did pressed metal splashbacks on a display in a kitchen showroom I used to manage, and as such many of our clients opted for the same look. Powder Coated is definitely the way to go. It stands up really well for durability and is in fact relatively easy to clean compared to many splashbacks. Often people think that glass or stainless steel are the easiest for cleaning, but due to being such a flat reflective surface they show up every splash and if you're going to clean them you really have to clean the full length of splashback. The textured surface of the pressed metal means that it doesn't reflect the same amount of light so you are able to get away with cleaning it less often, and you can also get away with just cleaning the dirty area rather than the full length. The biggest difficulty we found was getting the splashbacks installed as there aren't really any tradesmen who specialize in fitting pressed metal, and those that were willing to cut & fit it were concerned about what would happen if they damaged the paintwork. We had the panels cut to size first before they were powder coated to minimize the risk of chipping the surface.

My vote is for matte as well. Especially in the bathroom. If the tiles are near the shower, the glossy ones seem to lose their shine to the soap scum and need constant cleaning like glass screens, whereas it doesn't seem to happen on the matte tiles which are quite easy to clean. The stove and the sink are really the only places needing a spashback in the kitchen and my vote would be for matte finish there, even if you use the same tiles in gloss every where else.