Disclaimer The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's, client's, relative's, descendant's, or tax attorney's.
Well I am back in Seattle again, and it's an especially nice place to be i nthe summer if I can get out of the office. Windows 7 is close to shipping and we've gone on a secound round of visiting OEMs to test their images for the new flagship OS. On naked machines the numbers are better across the board. The biggest problem now still remains bundled software which isn't a problem per se, but when you add more software to a machine, it has more to do, more to store, more to read so it is going to have a performance cost. The build in WDDM drivers are quite good too for most of the hardware I've seen. This will certainly improve as those drivers are replaced by hardware vendor specific ones. However I think it's really cool that you can take most shake and bake laptops or desktops, install Windows 7 on it and it just works.
As a mac fan, I am very happy to see Windows 7 look a lot better too. It's just shinier. The icons are bigger and higer resolution, and everything has a little candy sheen to it. I love using Mac's, but I always come back to Windows because Entourage is a pale shadow of Outlook, and Visual Studio is unparalleled by anything I've seen on the Mac. Their development tools are probably excellent if you are used to their SDK, but I'm such a .NET head now, that I can just do more faster with that SDK, so I keep coming back to it.