Zhou's Blue website has published a bundle of Windows 7 Milestone 3 Build 6780 screen shots, with a video to come. The appearance is what you'd expect at this stage: it looks like Vista. If Microsoft does decide to freshen it up a bit, that will probably come at the beta 2 stage. However, while Vista's user interface has a few inconsistencies and could, in some places, do with a polish, it works well as it is.
My little illustration shows XP's WordPad word processor against the Windows 7 version. It's much like comparing Outlook Express with Windows Live Mail or IE6/7 with IE8.
The interesting question will be how well Windows 7 integrates with Windows Live services, which are currently moving to Wave 3. (Building in Mesh would be cool, but the dead hand of the US Justice Department just might fall over that.)
Microsoft is probably upset about the leaks so far ahead of release, but thousands of copies of Windows 7 will be in circulation fairly soon anyway. You can't keep a secret from tens of thousands of software houses, many thousands of PC manufacturers, and the hundreds of thousands of consultants etc whose businesses ultimately depend on it.
These people need a head start. After all, it seems to take the average software house four or more years to create a compatible version, and printer and graphics card makers need at least a couple of years to write a driver -- or three years to write a decent driver*. (Cynical? Moi?)
* Which is why Windows 7 will keep driver and software compatibilty with Vista, of course.
