Sorry to be the one to bash M$, but someone has to do it. IMO, M$ has gone crazy.
Any 'OS' that requires those insane specs (even though I meet them myself) does not deserve to reach the market. Why the
heck do you need those high specs? It's idiotic. I use Fluxbox in Gentoo 2005.0, and I can tell you, it looks quite nice, with cool effects such as AA, transparency, etc. You can even use GNOME, KDE, Enlightenment, etc, and they all look great (though I prefer flux), and do you know how much RAM is in use when I boot into Gentoo/Flux? About 80MB. Now, tell me, even with XP, how much RAM is in use when you just boot up.
I will never use Shorthorn on my own computer except maybe out of curiosity, and I certainly won't be paying for it. M$ is basically doing all of the wrong things... what's next, are they going to pull the kernel from ShortHorn?

Or maybe they'll pull IE7 from it too.