Holy Crap!!
Longhorn Beta is scheduled to hit the interweb, and existence, by the end of June!! Aero, Avalon, and several other components are allready nearing completion and have pre-beta versions available!!
Plus, Longhorn promises to run in 64-bit mode!! Which is nice since this fall, AMD is supposed to release their new line of Opteron processors designed for desktop PCs! Were talking 19GHz processors with 256TB maximum L2 memory cache!! AMD has slated the replacement of most of their Athalon and Duron processors as early as October!! OMFG!!!
for more info, visit http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn