most people i know that have tried it, have all, well certainly most have gone back to XP within 2 nights at the most. I pretty much knew before installing beta2 that i would end up going back to xp the same day, but couldnt stop myself from installin it to see what its like first hand. I personally found that the control panel and My Computer are very anoying, but thats probably because ive been using xp for so many years. the GUI looks impressive, yeah, but imo not worth the extra resources it uses compared with XP.
Biffons, maybe try what i told mitch, download a virtual PC program, and try installing it on that, then you can see what its like, without burning to DVD, or risk of anything going wrong with your current XP install, and after you are done with it, can easily just uninstall the virtual pc program and its all gone.