So I installed Windows 7 yesterday. Those of you with college email addresses go check out [link] ; most likely you can get it for $30.

It's pretty darned awesome. Some people have reported massive reductions in memory overhead vs. Vista; it's about the same for me although dwm.exe is 1/7 the size it used to be.
The UI's pretty different from Vista but I think mostly in a good way. I can't get over how the glow on the taskbar icons follows my cursor.
The way it handles desktop wallpapers is completely new, and I absolutely love it. First of all, they FINALLY added the option to scale an image and maintain its aspect ratio instead of just stretch/center/tile (should have been in Windows 98, honestly, but whatever )! Furthermore, instead of just picking an image you can point it at a folder and it'll shuffle through all of them (or a subset, if you want) on a customizable time delay. It's pretty much a gimmick for most people, but I have well over 400 wallpapers, so this is pretty much the best feature I've ever seen.

Also, HOLEY CARP THEY UPDATED MSPAINT! It's still got the usual pixel tools, but it actually has antialiasing and brushes now! Mind you, it's CRAP antialiasing and brushes, but hey it wouldn't be MSPaint if it wasn't a piece of garbage, now would it?

Supposedly it's a pretty big performance improvement in games; I haven't tested it since the only things I'm playing right now are osu!, which could run on a netbook, and Aion, which has a stupidly inefficient engine...

Overall I'd say it's a whole lot better than Vista. Probably not worth spending retail price on, but if you can get it for $30 it's definitely worth the money.

Also, pretty much the first site I checked after getting it up and running was Penny Arcade, and I was greeted with this: [link]