And I have to say, I've quite enjoyed the experience. E17 is a very well put together desktop environment. Things I love:

1. The amount of control you get over your windows (it can optionally remember which virtual desktop, size, postition, etc. you want an application in, as well as conveniently being able to start it at login and/or pin it to the desktop). Very nice, as Borat would say.
2. Low resource usage for nice bling - and not so much bling as polish really. Try it and you'll see what I mean. It's a good looking desktop, no doubt.
   
3. I like middle click on the desktop and you get a list of open windows. Switching to other windows is remarkably easy after a while.

Things I prefer about Gnome:

1. Transparency with compiz/beryl
2. Expose like feature of compiz/beryl
3. Integration of Gnome apps such as rhythmbox, etc. E17 still doesn't have a systray - I use trayer to get around it, but it's not ideal. It's a blight on an otherwise great desktop for E17.
4. Avant Window Navigator. Cover album integration is too nice.
   

I have to say, at this stage I'm not sure whether I'm going to stick with E17 or Gnome. Stay tuned....

Granted about 4 of that was waiting for the updates to come down the (what turns out is a pretty slow) pipe. I had a few issues, but nothing major given distro upgrade to a pre-beta release.

1. Removed know troublesome packages (beryl, for instance)
2. Removed all non-ubuntu sources from /etc/apt/sources.list and ran sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade (while still in edgy)
3. Changed /etc/apt/sources.list - s/edgy/feisty/g
4. sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade
5. Ran into first gotcha - tor seemed to have issues which halted the upgrade - ran it again and it continued fine (tor still giving me issues now though)
6. Continued running dist-upgrade  until no more issues
7. Some issues
1. Compiz seems to load up without window decorators - turn it off and on again and it's fine.
2. Changed to using the shiny new bcm43xx wireless driver for my broadcom wireless card - was in edgy but a little flaky (seems better so far)
3. tor package still broken, as is cups (most likely these will be fixed it due course)
4. Listen froze up on me once - trying rhythmbox now since I like the avant-window-manager cover art plugin

I'll post if there are any other issues I come across, but all in all, I like it so far!

2007-03-19: Suspend to RAM not working. Have filed a bug (or at least, commented on a relevant bug report) and will see where that takes me.