Got it installed and seems like a clean update on Vista. Somebody must have cracked the whip on simplicity, since nearly everything involving user interaction got simpler. Since it is mostly feature extensions on Vista, it is quite stable.

Some less noticed changes:
* IE8 now runs all tabs and windows in separate processes, so there is no longer a distinction between tabs and windows. There is also (finally) a Mozilla style jump-highlight in-page search. There is a convenient “In Private” mode that leaves behind nothing, but it is kind of stupid in that it doesn’t sandbox in cookies to delete them afterwards but in fact doesn’t appear to store them at all, breaking some sites… or maybe it’s just a bug. There are also these “accelerators” to web services (like smart tags on crack), not that useful in my opinion.
* English ink input in continuous mode now displays recognitions in-place, rather than in typeface underneath.
* Services for Unix (the POSIX subsystem) is much much improved and is actually usable for compilation.
* Monad (or PowerShell), which got dropped from Vista, is in. Very nice.
* Desktop backgrounds now come in sets of images, rather than one image.
* Yet another new directory structure for user home directory. The “data” folders in the home directory like Pictures, Music, Movies, Documents are now symbolically separated into a “Libraries” indexing structure (kind of like in WMP), and apparently you can create multiple libraries. Not sure if this is implemented cleanly enough, but intersting.

That’s about it.