From my experience of win 7 RC I thought it was amazing, albeit cpu
thirsty,really amazing though, it configured all of my hardware (except for
sound for my specific hardware), and the wifi, I played cpu intensive games like
Far Cry on it too, and the frame rate was very good!!!

I can sympathise with you though where you say its like learning computers all
over again, its the same with me, I have gone from using win xp to linux Ubuntu
and I am asked of linux many questions and settings about items windows would do
automatically (saves days of time).