As to the operating system itself, I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised. I was expecting a horrible, crappy operating systems in the same vein as Windows ME. While I haven't tested it enough to confirm the stability, the operating system appeared to have fairly good performance despite the bloat (the Beta is the Ultimate Edition and as such has many features that I didn't need on my computer--such as TabletPC functionality and such). Graphically, it looked quite nice, but who really cares? Not me. The sidebar is kind of annoying, even though you can easily cover it up with items or turn it off--it's just awkward there and not nearly as elegant as Google's desktop widgets or OS X's Dashboard. The various security warnings people complained about were present, but I didn't find them particularly annoying as they appeared for roughly the same things that I see the security warnings on Unix-based systems (e.g. Linux and OS X). The built in search functionality, like MSN search, sucks and isn't really worth using. It's deceptively fast--the speed comes from it not searching the entire system by default... it also couldn't find a file I had downloaded that I was unable to find due to the the temporary download folding being hidden/moved (I couldn't find it even after turning on the option to show all hidden files/folders). In addition, the menu formerly known as 'Start' now makes you click on the folders to open them (which almost every non-tech savvy user I know does anyway--but it's an annoyance for power users such as myself). In addition, many things are now even more hidden in Vista than they were in XP and in order to find some of the options you want to change you now need to click at least once or twice more to find what you're looking for (but as these are options that probably should be hidden from the average user and probably won't be changed much even by the power user this isn't really a complaint). Neither my built in sound card nor my PCI sound card had Vista drivers, so I was unable to test the media functions out of the box, but it does at least have a DVD decoder built in out of the box and I know there's also supposed to be DVD burning functionality built in out of the box as well, which is a nice addition/change over XP. On a final note, while IE7 has finally added tabs and become slightly more modern... it's still behind the game and still sucks. I'm also disappointed that their creation of new tabs doesn't copy the current page (as that's one complaint I have about almost all tabbed browsers--and one of the few features I liked about IE was the creation of a new page being a copy of the current page... although sometimes that got annoying...
In conclusion, while Windows Vista was better than I expected... it was also extremely bloated (maybe the other versions will do a better job of slimming down) and it still seemed like it was only just catching up with OS advancements that have been in Linux and OS X for a few years now. There was nothing truly innovative, nothing really worth the few hundred dollars of upgrading--just shiny new paint and some features that fall short of alternative options. Still, if you're in the market for a new PC (and really HAVE to have Windows) then Vista is worth waiting the year for instead of getting the already dead XP.
*UPDATE: One thing that I forgot to mention is that while it is sort of annoying to have to drill down to find some settings, I also found that somewhat beneficial as I often felt information overload due to the data density of the screens. The new setting pages are much cleaner now, and I think that will help alleviate some problems, even if it does create a slight annoyance.
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