So…my new toy arrived yesterday afternoon, and I got to play with it for the first time last night. Obviously, its too soon to gush too much, but I will say that, without a doubt, the out-of-box-experience was nice, and the first six hours with it were very nice…and maybe most importantly, stable. I was able to watch videos, listen to music, read documents…SCROLL…all without a single problem or crash. VERY refreshing indeed.

I’m still not quite sure yet how I’m going to do the Windows thing on it just yet…as in, whether I’m going to use Bootcamp or virtualize (is that a word?) it with Fusion…or a combination of both. I think I’m leaning toward the latter…a combination of either/both. VMWare Fusion has a really nice feature that will let you virtualize a Bootcamp partition, so I could basically use Windows either way, depending on how I need to use it. I could either log out completely and login to Windows natively…or login to OS X and virtualize Windows. I’ll post more on that later once I’ve got that going.

In general, I was able to get up-and-running with the Mac pretty easily. Installing software on it is a breeze (it really does make it stupid simple). I got connected very easily. Multimedia works great without any problems at all. I’m very pleased with all of that.

There are still some things that I need to find a good solution for…like a basic code-editor. I’ve heard a ton of good things about TextMate, but I’d rather not shellin’ out cash for software right away. Are there any decent alternatives to TextMate that are free? I’m considering giving Eclipse a shot, but that’s a bit heavier than I was hoping to have to resort to. We’ll see. Basic image editing software? Something like GIMP? Looks like there’s a few ports of GIMP for the Mac, but on first glance, they don’t appear to be quite as simple to get up-and-running with. I need to find out if there are other (free) options, or if I should just dive into getting GIMP setup…who knows, maybe its not as bad as it appears to be.

Touchpad…its gotta go. Much too much work to navigate around. Solution: this bluetooth mouse…should arrive soon I hope. Need to get a case for it too. Can’t just carry this thing around unprotected…too much of an investment to risk that. Any suggestions for a good one that won’t crack my wallet?

That’s pretty much it for the first night. Overall rating: 4/5 stars. Too early to rave about it too much, but great first impressions.