In case if you leave on another planet, let's reiterate the old news: Whidbey launch date is November 7th.
So far I have used Beta2, in a VMWare virtual machine which has 512 MB RAM dedicated, on an Athlon 1800+ CPU, and I am pretty impressed by it's speed. My team-mates say that they want an upgrade to 1GB on their computers when will switch to Whidbey, but I think that the speed won't be very different than Visual Studio 2003.
Anyway, I wait it because it comes with many good things, all the annoying stuff that was present in VS 2002/2003. It will probably come with another round of annoying things, but hey, that's life.
One thing I like a lot, is the fact that the mobile development and desktop development is under the same roof without any additional installations. Still, in Beta2 I tried to develop last week a desktop utility that connects to the mobile to display databases info. Unfortunately I did not find rapi.lib and rapi.h, and had to copy them from a Smartphone SDK. Is this a miss of the Beta2, or it will be also in the final version. On the other hand, ARM emulator simply rocks.
The first thing that I'll do after I install the final release is to have it build for previous frameworks (1.0 & 1.1) and we are all set.
PS: Today I even found someone from Microsoft asking if there is interest in getting this feature of targetting the previous runtimes.