I shifted to the beta Build 7000 when it had released and later upgraded to RC (build 7100) when that had come out. I must say that right from the beta days, it felt like a very complete OS. Not for a moment that I felt I was using a pre-release or a beta OS. This first-hand experience led me to immediately to think that this is going to be a huge success and that Vista was supposed to be like this which it never did.
Now that the versions, the packaging, the pricing and the release date is announced, it has created a whole lot of buzz around it and has got me and many others excited to find out what's in store in the final RTM. How is it going to handle the DX11 graphics and how it is going to run on old or low-powered netbook hardware.
The pricing is lower than its Vista equivalent and anything about it has managed to garner a lot of attention. So, even hardware companies like AMD are associating themselves with it to piggy-back on its news for publicity. GPU makers ATI and nVidia have announced drivers for their cards for the new OS. Every Technology Forum, every technology blog worth its salt is talking about something or the other.
So definitely, 7 is worth the wait. Steven Sinofsky's decision to keep the name simple and straight forward, to keep everything under wraps until it was completely ready unlike Vista and the Engineering that has gone behind its design to make it draw the least juice out of the hardware has made it the darling of the masses. I have no doubts that this will make a great purchase for anyone looking for a new refreshing computing experience.
