Anyone got IE 7?

Looking around sites on web design, I notice that many of their authors, who are far more fanatical than I am about web standards, are giving cautious approval to the beta of Internet Explorer 7. It's not quite a thumbs up, more of a pat on the back for going in the right direction, but it does seem that IE7 may get to where other browsers were a few years back. It might just be the case that Microsoft have avoided the fate of Netscape, who waited several years between NS4 and NS6, then sealed their fate by producing one of the worst browsers ever. (Of coure this painful process gave rise to Mozilla and then to Firefox, but that's another story.)

So I'm curious. Has anyone here tried IE7? Is it that much more standards-compliant than IE6? Does it have a chance of competing with Firefox? Can it display my home page correctly? Can I stop putting ugly hacks into my other websites to make them display properly in Internet Eplorer?