I hear you man. I suppose you can always upgrade to Vista and then upgrade to Windows 7… seems a bit expensive though. I did hear that Microsoft offered that to a select group — I don’t know what the criteria are to be a part of the group, however. Apparently, their reasoning is that the upgrade just won’t work smoothly so you are better off doing a clean install for stability’s sake. Either way, upgrading to a better operating system seems more than a reasonable argument for -why- you would upgrade.

As for the email program: I personally always hated the stock email program so I am glad it is gone. I am a cloud email user though, so it works for me. I go out of my way to avoid programs like Live and Thunderbird — and especially Outlook…. I am curious about Office 2010 — especially the cloud aspects of it.