It’s just that fast.
It’s actually quite zippy on my elderly Blue & White G3, so on the 500 MHz iMac, it should be quite nice. Opened windows drag around more smoothly, things just seem to pop where they didn’t before.
I miss the CPU monitor, even though it has been replaced by a more full-featured system monitoring tool (yeah, I could show some screenshots, but I’m not on that machine right now). Perhaps someone at Apple will make that available again: I liked having my utilization displayed in the Dock.
I like the networking panel in the new brushed-metal Finder, as well. Since the systems on my network speak every protocol I know about — AppleTalk, samba/CIFS, NFS — I have a couple of choices to share files. But I found browsing them to be fast and easy. The shared volumes don’t mount but display their contents in the panes of the network browser: not a big deal. AppleTalk volumes do mount and appear on the Desktop as one would expect.
One feature I want to try out is the Fax server: it will received FAXes and can print and/or email them. I see that as being very useful to mobile types (like realtors) who do a lot of business by FAX. What I would like to be able to do is print to the FAX server as if it were a printer: should be possible, but I haven’t looked into it yet.
Sadly, I’ll never see it on my 2 * 1.25 GHz work machine, since I’m leaving in two weeks and I’ve already given it away (I was asked “if there was any way to get any value out of it, would anyone want it?”). But perhaps if I can find something else I can finally snag one of those 12 inch iBooks, expecially now that they’re G4s.