It's basically Windows XP except it is slower and BSODs a lot more, at least for me (and this is with only 3 weeks use so far). Also the Ctrl-space keybinding has been stolen by the hard-to-disable language bar, which keeps intermittently reactivating itself even though I've cleared the keybinding and removed the Chinese language it was bound to. It keeps deciding that I should be typing in Chinese anyway (even with the language ostensibly removed) instead of selecting text in emacs.
Oh yeah. Copying large files over a network is also slow (not just slowish, but brutally, unbelievably, mind-buggeringly slow) and can crash explorer completely. Quick question for MS: what's the first thing many users want to do with a new machine? Maybe transfer photos/videos/music to the new box? Hmmmm?
I am about 2 days from going and blowing another couple of hundred on a new XP disc and wiping this Vista partition.
Torben