Well, it's home and set up, all twenty diagonal inches of it. Nice bright, crisp display (my 1280 x 1024 LCD looks positively dim beside it) and, at least on the set of "universal binary" apps provided, zippy as all get-out compared to the elderly system architecture it has supplanted.
The out-of-box experience would have been all-but seamless for a first-time user, I think; was somewhat less so for me. I was keen to use the advertised feature (available only on setup) that would transfer my libraries, settings, applications &c via ethernet from the superannuated machine. Alas, the old box couldn't recognize "FireWire Target Disk Mode," and so I've been obliged to move (thus far) my iPhoto and iTune collections, as well as my Safari bookmarks, manually over the ethernet cable. I'll reinstall the major apps from CD-ROM if necessary (but—heaven help us!—they are all upgrade versions, and I'll have to dig up the serial numbers of iterations past!) and see what kind of performance hit if any (recall that my basis for comparison is an elderly machine running at a quarter of the new one's rated speed) we take. I'm hoping to retain the functionality of my flatbed scanner, and to retrieve the functionality of my printer (which can have the lone ethernet port if it wants—I'm using the built-in wireless).
Additional details as these become available.
cordially,