It looks better. It will take me a while to get used to though. Also, right now everything feels very sluggish, and the fact that some parts can only be navigated by the d-pad is becoming more of a nuisance than before - I find myself ending up in places I didn't want to go to. Also while the looks have changed, the navigation paths haven't changed that much it seems. Community games seem even more hidden than before, but who knows that will change eventually. The media player suffers even more from slowness. Mind you this is all on my system, your mileage may vary and I'm hoping things will get smoother as time progresses.
Sad to hear about the HDMI support but on the plus side for me that's actually good, because when I get my second PS3 and one will go to the study, the PS3 will go on the HDMI of my 22" LCD and the 360 will stay on the VGA.
A huge plus for me is the 1680x1050 support. Although it's not that much better most of the time because hardly anything (including the new dash I think) outputs more than 720p, and the aspect ratio didn't bother me that much either, but it still looks better than before and it just feels better. I tried the Tomb Raider Underworld demo and that looks pretty good now, despite the (additional) upscaling.
A huge plus also is the HDD install, simply because the DVD drive is so noisy and I'm sitting a foot from it, which is nearly unbearable. The next time I get a 360 game it will definitely end up on my HDD - I already made enough space by killing demos. I also unfortunately only have 20GB HDD, but its enough for one game, and the way things are going it doesn't seem likely I'll ever need space for more than one game.
I can definitely see that the friends interface is big improvement though. I don't have a huge collection of friends on the 360 that I regularly game or whatever with, but I can see it would work pretty well.