Ron, I sympathize with your underwhelming sense of Leopard -- and bummed to hear your MBP has Leopard problems. I understand Leopard is largely an "infrastructure" change, and the UI changes were mostly modest and in several cases wrong-headed.
Despite the modest visual changes from Tiger, I think Leopard is the "Switcher's" OS. My gut sense a year ago to go Mac with Leopard was correct; just it was delayed four months past my must-buy date
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The Finder is a robust system with good polish added. QuickLook is great. To my amazement, CoverFlow is useful! Spotlight kills; fast enough to be an app launcher. BootCamp is official. And with Parallels and Fusion one-upping each other, switching is ever easier and affordable. And key bugs were fixed: Aaron's comment on the Finder not beach balling is spot on.
Hopefully bug fixes will come out in short order to help the early adopters. And hopefully we can get fixes for the stupid UI changes.