Love to see the great reactions to the Windows 7 beta. I have been running the beta for about a month as my primary machine, and it seems incredibly stable given its beta status.
I LOVE the new taskbar, the window preview is even nicer than Vista’s (and I was pretty jazzed about that feature in Vista). I really like the ability to control the icons in the notification area. I am also a fan of how window docking works now, although it is hard to break old habits. As silly as it sounds, I even like the ribbon UI in WordPad and Paint, I think it makes them easier to use since I still use Paint quite a bit (despite the awesomeness of Paint.NET).
So far, the only application compatibility issue I have run across is that the application that comes with my HP printer won’t allow me to install because HP hard-coded the Windows version, the app says “Unsupported OS version.” That was easy enough to get around simply by installing the printer driver.
I have seen a few issues where various sites don’t work well with IE8, but that has also been easy to get around by viewing them in compatibility mode.
I am pretty excited about Windows 7 these days, and love to see the turnaround in buzz about the product.
I agree with you that Win7 is absolutely fantastic. In fact, it's the first MS beta OS I've run since NT5, and reminds me a lot of the Win95 beta in its fit/finish. This is coming from a Vista-hater (and it's not because of perceived bugs but rather the horrible resource footprint and overall UI inconsistency combined with the flakiness of that rev of explorer.exe)
One negative about Win7, though: IE8 is pretty bad, IMO. I have the thing crash almost daily just by virtue of random navigations. The UI is good, and performance is OK, but even though it's just a beta, it is disheartening for an app purporting to be on version 8 to be that unstable. I can't remember the last time I perceived IE to be stable, but I don't like to see that particular area of the code to be getting worse. On the positive side, I have much worse things to say about the Adobe Flash plug-in.