Never trust Norton, it's one of the worst Anti Virus programs you can get.
SV: Installation took an hour? Fuck that's a long time. I thought you had pretty good specs too. Only took me half an hour or so, which for an OS is pretty decent.
My opinions and observations so far:
IE8
Well, it's far superior to IE7. Feature like private browsing are now added. And best of all, STANDARDS COMPLIANCE! YES! Finally, sites actually display correctly in IE, no stupid CSS hacks needed to make sites work!
Still won't make me switch from Firefox though. I use too many addons etc. and Firefox 3.1 will have private browsing so there's literally no reason to change to IE8.
Drivers
Yeah it's awesome that it can use Vista drivers. The only thing I actually needed to install drivers for was my USB wireless adapter, everything else worked straight out of the box, even my graphics card.
ATi do actually have Windows 7 drivers already out which is great, installed those fine so I may try some games tomorrow on it, see how they play.
New taskbar
It's growing on me. Didn't think it was much of an improvement at first but now I've used it it's actually quite nice. Say you've got multiple tabs open in your browser, you click the icon in the taskbar to go to it and get preview windows of all your open tabs, hovering over one will preview it fullscreen. Nice touch.
And if you're downloading files. The icon has a progress bar in the background so you can judge how much it's done even if not even using the browser. Another nice touch. It also looks a lot less cluttered so that's an good improvement.
I don't give a shit if people think they're coping OS X or whatever, because who fucking cares, it's an improvement IMO, so good on MS for doing it.
Program compatibility
Haven't tried all that much yet, but I've had no errors doing anything so far.
Installed DivX 7 codecs so I can play movies and stuff.
Installed VLC so I can watch it all.
Just about to get some IM's so I can talk to peeps online.
Anything anyone wants me to test who hasn't/can't install the beta?