I got my hands on Windows 7 Beta 1. It is extremely fast, even in beta state. I installed it into a VMWare image. It initially had 512 mb of RAM. It ran, but it was "stuttering" a lot. I upped the ram to 1 gig, and it is running pretty good now. Here are some screenshots:

This is what you see when Windows 7 is starting. I cropped it so that it would fit on the blog. It is actually animated. The picture above is what is left after the animation is done.

Here's the login screen. It looks just like the Vista logon screen.

This is what is on the left side of the Taskbar. There's the start button, just like in Vista. The next 3 icons appear by default. It's pretty hard to know what is a shortcut, or what is a running app. I hope that Microsoft fixes that. And yes, that's PainlessSVN running.

Here's the right side of the Taskbar. I really don't like how the real estate is being used for the tray bar. Unfortunately, I can't think of a better way of handling this.

PainlessSVN running in Windows 7! I'm extremely happy that it runs without problems. The take away here is that your hard work in making your app Vista ready, will payoff with Windows 7.

I'll see if I can post more Windows 7 screenshots, as I play with it.