im not a techy but based on the grief and aggro that has occured when all the above came out I wouldnt touch Windows 7 for at least 12 months
That fills me with joy-I bought a pre order copy and am about to install it on my netbook and home machine. Not as stupid as I sound though as the techies from work have been running it for months as a test and are pretty impressed with it-we shall see.
I bought Cathy a Packard Bell laptop from PC World a couple of months ago, it came with Vista Home (Basic) so not entitled to the so called free upgrade, Bummer
I am typing this in 7 on a laptop designed for 2000 or xp - low-spec. I upgraded it from vista last night. It now seems to work faster than with vista, and tbh, it wasnt that wonderful with xp. So, overall, I'm impressed so far, and will be upgrading my desktop too.
There's no cost involved luckily, cos I have a msdn licence, but unfortunately the useless corporate I work for is still only running xp at work, so I rate this as 'necessary development' !
I've been using Windows 7 for months now and for me it worked right out of the box. No upgrade path from XP so it will mean a full backup and restore of your data, even MS recommend that a clean build is the way to go for those with Vista.
Conclusion
I'm one of those Windows bashers but when it comes to desktop / laptop computing environments it's pretty much the only way to go, we are now seriously thinking about a OS refresh program at work.