WIndows 7 does seem to be the thing that Vista wasn't - that is 'ready'. Although there will always be some hardware compatibility issues witha new OS Win7 has performed admirably on quite old hardware that I have tried it on and it looks like anything that can handle Vista will be better off on Win7. Both the taskbar and explorer function have been tweaked in ways that are useful - who would have thunk it, useful....MS must be on drugs.
UAC - vistas most hated feature - is still there but in a much less obtrusive way, so much that you hardly notice it. For anyone that is used to Vista this is quite a change.
WIndows 7 is not going to be the royal pain that Vista turned out to be unless Microsoft release something nothing like this candidate. There are a lot of new features and upgrades that make it nice as successor to XP and possibly the cure for Vista infected PCs, much more detail here - http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews/index.cfm?reviewid=106237&pn=1
Farkin Computers
In the pub