I'm using the Vista Beta 2 right now, and I like it in many ways and dislike it in others.
Pros:
-- Stunning text recognition, must be about %99.8 accurate. With my tablet PC, this is simply fantastic!
-- Looks pretty, but more then that the XML based Windows Presentation Foundation makes it very easy to create stunning "wigit"-like applications, like Konfabulator or DesktopX only much more rich (and 3D!).
-- Very stable. For example, when explorer crashes it restarts without issues and nothing in the display is messed up. Again, when the video driver crashes it just restarts it.
-- Updates require a restart much less often, and no drivers require restart afaik.
-- Comes with Media Centre, voice recoginition and Tablet PC built in.
-- Fast and powerful search system, unlike XP.
-- GUI is very fast, thanks to hardware accerelation
-- System almost never locks up. Even when one app is going 100% CPU and leaking memory like mad, it still reserves resources for the OS to keep thing fairly responsive. This way, the Task Manager is always accessible, so you can shut down the offending app.
-- File paths are cool to work with, in that you can manipulate each folder part as a drop down list that shows folder's contents. Again, when typing in a path you get an auto-complete box that responds very fast.
-- You can alt-tab to your desktop, and the Win-tab is very cool.
-- Hovering over items in your taskbar, you get a small but live preview of the window. I mean live in that if there is something animated in the window (e.g. a video in WMP), you see it going in the preview. Alt-Tab and Win-Tab also do this.
-- Much nicer support for multiple keyboard formats. You can even colourise the icons for each format, so you can just glance at the start bar and see what's set.
-- Great little side bar wigit thing for the Tablet PC. It's a little thing that hangs on the side of the screen, moving out from just a sliver when you roll over it, and when you click it slides right out into a nice handwriting input box. When you're done, it just slides back! Very cool.
-- Updates are much more streamlined and backgroundable.
-- Gaming folder is sort of cool. You can see ratings, genres, preview pics, when you last played, etc...
-- Parental controls are very powerful. You can control how much time your kids use the computer, what hours they are allowed on, games they can play (including rating filters), websites they can visit, programs the can run, and to top it off it gives you activity reports to see exactly what they are doing.
-- WMP10 and IE7 are vast improvements over the previous versions.
-- DirectX 10 is very cool.
-- I'm sure side show would be awesome if I actually had a secondary display.
-- Windows Sidebar an the WPF enabled wigits that go with it are pretty cool, although I'm not using them right now.
-- In the system tray you can set it so that certain icons are never hidden by that little arrow thing.
-- All the graphics are very crisp and high resolution (256x256 on average by my guess).
-- It will have nicely scalable DPI settings, but afaik right now it has the same crap as XP.
-- In the file explorer you get nice previews of folder and file contents in their respective icons, which can be scaled in size from very small to excessively large (for the visually impared I guess, or just close inspection).
Cons:
-- Network manager is simply fubar. When you save networks, you can't remove them and the interface is confusing. This should be fixed in the final version though.
-- They tried to make the Control Panel less confusing, but I feel they accomplished the opposite. There are too many categories with too many side-options and too many items with too many sub-options. It's something of a guessing game to find the specific thing you want. If they had a tree view, so I could see all the items efficently it would be ideal. Fortunitly, you can still switch to classic view.
-- The File Explorer/My Computer can be a bit too cluttered sometimes. Normally, you have a search bar, address bar, favorite locations pane, properties pane and other options all crammed in there, and this is fine unless you shrink the window real small. However, as soon as you open the file tree, it gets a bit overwhelming. Not only that but the file tree is really crammed in there. If they made it replace the favorities pane when opened, it would be much nicer.
-- Slow as molasses, but that's just the beta aspect of it really. I'm sure it will be fixed.
-- Program "warnings" that ask you to allow some program to access some system setting, file or whatever come up way too often and serve little purpose. They never ask for a password, so the average idiot will pay no heed. They come up for things like Windows Updates, Spyware/Virus scanner updates, just looking at your system devices, changing folder permissions, installing any program that isn't from a "trusted" source as indicated in your internet security settings or by their MS security certificate, opening the task manager, and countless other even more trivial things. It's just annoying. Worst of all, when it comes up it blocks out the rest of the screen until you deal with it.
-- The "shut down" button doesn't actually shut the computer down, but puts it in standby. To actually shut down you have to go into a side menu.
), and last shooter I played was farcry (2y ago) 
