I've been using Windows 7 since April and have the RTM running on my machine at home. I like quite a bit about Windows 7, but there are a few things I love, and a couple that I hate.

I love how quick it is. It takes maybe 20 secs after BIOS post to get to the login screen (for some reason the RAID in my computer makes the BIOS post a couple times to detect it). After hitting return to log in, the interface is completely loaded and 100% responsive in less than 10 secs (it is around 6-7 secs).

I don't like how they put 'spaces' in between some windows. The first thing I do in any Windows install is the UserPreferences +1h change to enable focus follow mouse without raising the windows. While switching between apps with several windows or in the icon notification area, I am forced to use the arrow keys or do some other goofiness because the space in between the parent window and child window make the child window close while moving my mouse to it. For the notification area that means bringing up the hidden notifications, then right clicking to get a menu that bridges the two windows, then moving the mouse to the child window. It shouldn't be that awkward.

The Control Panel takes some getting use to. I still have to read each of the labels on the icons to figure out what I need. I'd think it would be easier for me after half a year, but I am probably just slow.

It was a complete pain in the ass to try to use a disk with a previous version of Windows 7 as a data disk. All kinds of permission errors, and doing ownership changes wouldn't 'take' for all the subdirectories. I ended up have to go through the filesystem from the top, find out which one failed, then go into that directory structure and keep doing the ownership/permission changes until it found the file that was causing the problem and changing that one separately. That was ugly.

Overall, I think it is a huge improvement over both XP and Vista. I think I like it better than XP because that version of x64 just seemed... kludgey might be the best word for it. The only other strike against XP is modern hardware support. That isn't surprising based on the age of the OS, but it is nice not having to dick around to try to get all the drivers loaded on a new install.