Am I surprised?
Definitely.
I've been generally happy. There are a few oddball problems here and there, but nothing major.
The biggest annoyance for me is how my desktop occasionally freezes up for 10-15 seconds (!) when I'm switching folders with an application to do a 'save' or 'open.' And despite the fact that I've got Aero and all the interface eye-candy turned off (and all my drivers fully updated) some screen actions occasionally behave in a sluggish manner. I'm sure it has a lot to do with my inadequate video hardware. To be fair, Microsoft's Upgrade Advisor did say the onboard video I'm using was suboptimal even though it was compatible. Again no big deal. I've been meaning to get a decent card for this machine anyway.
I have had some problems with drag & drop actions, but they all seem to be issues for specific apps and not a system-wide problem. I'm sure most of these hassles will disappear with future app updates.
One thing I was (negatively) surprised by was the amount of RAM and resources Win7 uses. Especially after all the hype that went down about how much Win7 had improved over Vista in that area. Make no mistake - Microsoft's old 400 lb. gorilla is now an 800 lb. gorilla! Then again, even if Win7 is twice the size of WinXP, maybe it's not all that relevant any more. RAM is cheap enough. And Moore's Law seems to be on Microsoft's side, so this isn't something I'm going to worry about long-term.
There's also another negative thing I experienced about Win7 firsthand:
it's significantly slower than XP. When I first switched over, I was surprised at how 'light' Win 7 felt. But going back to an XP machine after a solid week of working exclusively under Win7 was enough to remind me just how much faster XP is across the board.
Bugger! So it is true what they say about it being slower.
Still, that being said, I agree with Mouser that the overall Win7 UI workflow does seem to help you get your tasks done more efficiently. Obviously a lot of thought went into the new interface deign. In that area, I'm willing to concede it does work better than XP. Because when I switched back to using XP, I was amazed at just how arbitrary and clumsy the GUI often felt after working with Win7. Especially now that I had something other than KDE, Gnome, or Xfce to compare it to.
Slower system speed but a better interface? On well...since nothing's ever perfect, "good enough" will have to do. And Win7 is a fair bit more than "good enough" so I'm not complaining.
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) book that hits on all the major features of Microsoft's newest server. Primary audience is the system administrator. But it's not an overly technical treatment so it can also be read as a quick intro to the beast that is MS Server 2008.