I technically work for Microsoft, so I got the beta (build 6800 or something -- upgrade to 7000 this past Friday) like a month or so ago. Right now, I have it dual-booting with Vista. If you have Vista, you can resize partitions and choose to "shrink" a volume. It makes installing it easier. In any case, yeah, been playing around with it off and on. As much as I like a lot of the pieces in it, I'm going to miss the classic Windows 95 through Vista interface. The tasks at the bottom and the system tray being expanded, although I know you can customize them to match the old look -- but I want to try to get on board with the new interface.
Overall, very impressed with everything. It's still technically Vista -- the only difference is that the Kernel is upgrade from 6.0 to 6.1 internally. i.e. It's Vista remade/polished. That being said, a lot of the features they wanted to put in, but couldn't because they rushed Vista, were finally added. That's why you're seeing a drastically different UI in some cases -- in some cases, you'll notice the UI and theme just "fits" everything better. To me, Vista felt a little... Like they were stepping in a direction, but didn't go all the way.
As far as performance -- you'll notice (if you were on Vista) most of your scores on performance will increase a bit. Some of my 5's jumped to low 6's. A huge difference in HDD will be obvious, though, since they're kind of keeping in mind the chance of future SSD's. My only issue is that software claims to run on a Windows Experience Rating of <x>. Well, if your other scores are high, i.e. 5-6, and your HDD is a 2, and a program says it runs best on a 3, most people will say, "Crap, I can't run this on my computer!" Might be good to rework some logic behind it -- I was thinking maybe they botched the code somewhere, but I don't have access to the code -- just the builds when they release them internally.
A big thing to get used to was the ribbon bar -- I don't play around with Office much, so I haven't had time to adjust to it. However, I was pleased that they still give you options for the menus when you hit alt -- just the way the normal menus used to work. And in addition to the pretty interface and icons, letters usually show up on the icons to let you know which to press for what. Pretty cool.
Most importantly, you'll notice a drastically smaller footprint in your memory and CPU cycles from Windows alone -- the only downside (I've discovered...) is that Windows eats up about 10GB of space on its own. Not sure if there's a lot of stuff dumped in the OS or if part of that is necessary to run it so quickly (I doubt it -- but it's possible they make some weird cache's on the disk).
Looking forward to switching when it becomes affordable/within reason.
--Terin
