el reg needs a percentage score at the top of every story about MS software
to give an idea of the quality of the comments section. A higher percentage means that you'll be spending quite a lot of your lunch hour pgdning through comments from people you tend to avoid at school reunions and office parties.
Personally quite like Windows 7, although I'd be interested to see how corporate IT guys deal with it when it's in the corporate mainstream. I run Ubuntu in a VMware setup on Windows 7 and it's still doing my web, FTP and ssh stuff whilst I'm playing Fallout 3.
It's a bit like the article also published recently in El Reg about Apple's latest line of products - it's rather a yin release, which is probably a good thing. Of course, Windows 7, with its history, is going to draw some attention by missing out a beta step, and I think it's justifiable to ponder why MS has gone down this route. No matter how good it looks in beta, it's going to get pulled apart once it hits retail, and questions are going to be asked as to whether the time it decided not to use was well spent?