From what I have seen so far Windows 7 is an improvement over Vista but nothing special. They sure seem to be fast tracking this OS which is an admission IMO that Microsoft knows Vista is a flop even if they don't publicly admit it.
No, I'm not a MS fanboy. I'm just tired of people bashing Vista/MS; Vista isn't that bad, and Win7 will be what Vista was meant to be.
That is the problem. After 7 years of development the new OS (Vista) should be a lot more than "isn't that bad". It is not an upgrade and requires some serious hardware and tweaking to get it as good as XP.
As for the new Task Bar it's ugly. It looks like XP's Task Bar if you double it's size which I don't do. The features are not bad though.