I have been playing with Mac OS X Tiger for about a week now, and overall I'm really impressed. It actually does represent a significant improvement over previous versions. General thoughts:

• Faster? Well it certainly doesn't feel any slower! On a 1.5Ghz Powerbook with 1Gb RAM, it flies but then so did Panther. On my 450Mhz (*2) G4 tower I haven‘t noticed any real difference. I couldn’t really say with any authority - it‘ll certainly be interesting to see how it feels on my G3 500Mhz Powerbook - mind you that’s only got 256Mb RAM …
• Dashboard - yeah well it does what it says on the tin. (BTW the cool ripple effect, and the zoom in both require half decent graphics cards - and that seems to exclude the ones in the Mac Mini. Overall … it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next few months in terms of what is developed. Worth a mention at this point is Amnesty, which allows you to run Dashboard widgets outside of the Dashboard environment - could see this being useful.
• Spotlight - haven't used it much per se. More on this later. Suffice to say that it really does work and well.
• Mail 2. Some people don‘t like the new interface - I think it’s OK. On the other hand smart mailboxes eg Today‘s mail, or All New Mail or whatever … absolutely awesome. Loving it. So far that is where spotlight is shining (haw haw pun intended) - inside applications (address book is great for the same reasons). Maybe I’ve just been using Quicksilver too long to worry that much about finding stuff!

More later ….