Hey, Mike....I agree that the reversal of the syntax can be a bit confusing at first. But I've gotten used to it.
One of the goals of LINQ, as stated by others who have presented LINQ, is that the focus is on "what" you're querying for, as opposed to "how". In this sense, LINQ succeeds, because you're basically using the same syntax (or very very similar syntax) regardless of whether you're querying against a database, or a collection, or XML, etc.
Kevin