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So, it's installed and these are my very first impressions.

Installation
It didn't seem to like SATA (my harddisk is SATA, my CDROM is not), telling me something about a non standard CDROM and that I'd have to select a driver from a floppy or something like that... At first I thought it couldn't handle my CD burner and installed my old CD ROM, but that wasn't it. When I disabled SATA, everything worked but this forced me to install on some prehistoric ATA disk which I had still lying around. Hopefully this will work better in the final release and I also think that it should try to do a better job at telling the user why it failed. :/
Aside from that, the installation was very nice, friendly and easy wording and no difficult selections. When it came to setting up a user, it told me something about the user to use "instead of the root user", considering that there is no root user, I think this wording should be changed.
It did not ask anything about package selection and the only thing it asked about hardware was the choice of screen resolutions (this should be improved). A few minutes later I could log in to X and load Firefox to write about my first impressions, so that's pretty cool. Of course still a lot of work left with regards to polish and hiding cryptic console messages. Setting up of the packages also took ages, some nice progress bar wouldn't have hurt. I guess that's all on the radar for the next release.

Desktop
The first notable thing is, that there are no desktop icons by default. This is again, quite refreshing and fits my working style, as I usually put a lot of my own files and documents on the desktop, which makes it an extremely hostile place for any kind of launcher. Also the trash finally sits on the panel, I always wanted to have it there and not hidden behind my windows. That's probably a GNOME 2.8 improvement but it's the first time I'm seeing it. It's especially useful because it follows Fitt's law, so you can just pick up anything, throw it into the corner and it will be gone.
The "Computer" menu at the top seems to be a similar idea to the "System" menu of Ximian. Accessing Home, Network, etc folders from here instead of from desktop launchers seems like a good idea to me. It's a bit weird to have "Desktop" there, which opens the desktop in a file manager window. This doesn't seem right to me from a consistency point of view, but on the other hand, it's extremely useful...
I really like that "Desktop Preferences" and "System Configuration" are separated by task and not by whether you need root privileges or not. Everything seems to make sense.

The theme artwork is also pretty nice but everyone can see that on the screenshots. I also like the cursor theme, which is very simple and friendly looking. Some parts about the Industrial-based theme could certainly still be improved. For example the checkboxes are as dark as the background which at first made them look deselected to me and it looks bad in menus. I think they would look much better with a white background. Some other details which I never enjoyed about Industrial are (this is not specific to Unbuntu):
- The many gray lines, which often end up as double lines and looking extremely ugly. Bluecurve was similar at first until they switched to a more 3Dish look, which has improved it a lot in my opinion.
- Some buttons are smaller than others on the same row, I guess that's some kind of bug?
- The text entry and arrow button of a combo box look very disconnected. The Luna theme manages to draw combo boxes in a way that makes the widgets look connected, I wish more rounded themes would do this (especially Industrial).

Negative so far has been that my refresh rate was set to 60hz and I could not increase it without reducing my resolution to 1024x768 (allowing me to chose 75hz). I get 85hz at 1280x1024 with Fedora, so something is wrong. Either it's the missing Nvidia drivers which I'll install next, or the autodetection got something wrong (it didn't ask me for my monitor frequency range). I fear it's the latter, which will probably force me to set the modelines manually in the Xserver config. :/

GNOME 2.8 so far makes me very happy, I tried the reworked FTP functionality and it's working beautifully.

Random Thoughts
Considering that this is a first preview of the first release and that all the exciting things seem to be planned for the second release, I'm deeply impressed so far. This is definitely not your standard distribution.
I love the no-root thingy, although it's probably not perfect yet, at least it should be another step into the right direction. Funny how this is exactly the opposite as how Lindows started, but with a similar usability goal.

Now I'll try to copy this to my real harddisk and see if I can get it to boot... It would be a real shame if not, because I absolutely want to give this a longer testrun.

Hopefully the team will continue this way and keep thinking out of the box, and please keep the base install as small and GNOME centric as it is right now.

Now I wrote a lot more than I intended again, that's a sign that I need sleep.