Installation was pretty easy for me. After a few initial screens, it went on autopilot and installed itself. It even rebooted a few times and I didn't need to tend to it because it kept right on going after rebooting. I went out for several hours, came back, and it was all done.
The desktop looks simply beautiful. It uses a slide show that changes the wallpaper as frequently as (what seems) every couple hours or so. There are sweeping landscapes, images of nature, conceptual art, and even some nice sound schemes too. It all seems so much more organized too. The navigation after you press the Start button is vastly improved. You no longer need to keep moving your mouse anymore through endless and ever-expanding menus and submenus; instead, navigation is a lot like it works on the iPod. Menus now slide and expand into other menus all while occupying the same amount of space on the screen. If your menu of programs grows, you can scroll lower, but you don't have to possess a lot of mouse dexterity like you did under previous versions of Windows.
There are also a lot of more subtle but cool features too, like keyboard shortcuts and mouse actions that clear away extraneous windows, or position windows for side-by-side comparison with other windows, etc.
I'm telling you, it's slick.