I just purchased one of these this weekend as well. I had sold my late 2008 unibody MBP 15 inch for a really good price, and just wanted to try one of these in the meantime, while I'm waiting on the MBP refresh (I still have my MB Air).
So far, I'm actually liking this laptop much more than the MBP I just sold. The battery life is incredible. I charged it to full charge last night, and I've been using it at work all day (web browsing, a good bit of MS Word and Excel, some YouTube watching during downtime at work today, and email), and as of right now, I still have over 50% remaining on the battery, which it estimates to be 4 hours and 8 minutes of runtime. The MBP would have had to be charged long ago. Its very cool temp-wise while running (my MBP would get very hot doing the same tasks), and is surprisingly very, very fast, despite the slow-spec hard drive (5400RPM I believe) and only 2Gb of RAM. My MBP had the 2.4Ghz processor and had been upgraded to 4Gb of RAM, along with a 7200RPM 500Gb hard drive, and this computer honestly feels as fast, if not faster (certainly not slower like I had expected), than that one at the same tasks. It's very literally almost as fast as my SSD-equipped MB Air in opening most programs. I thought I'd have to add RAM immediately, but like the above poster, I think I might wait on that.
The screen is much better than I expected, considering I'd read several places that it wasn't very bright, even when turned all the way up. I actually can't take the brightness turned all the way up, and am using it at approximately 75% brightness, even in my well-lit office.
I thought that I'd miss the backlit keyboard, and while it is a nice feature to have, I don't really miss it at all. I usually don't have to look at the keyboard at all while typing (except for the function keys), and the light from the screen combined with the white keys makes everything very easy to see anyway (using it in bed the past couple of nights).
As far as the construction is concerned, it's very, very sturdy, much more so than any plastic, windows based laptop that I've owned recently. Yes, it's gloss white, and looks like it will scratch very easily, but for some reason I still like, and maybe prefer, the white over the aluminum of the MBP and my MB Air. But that's probably because it's just a different look that my eye isn't accustomed to seeing. I do worry that the white keys might become dirty fairly quickly however.
Speaker sound quality is good, noticeable difference between it and my MBP, but does seem a good bit louder.
All in all I'm pleasantly surprised by this machine. So far, I can't really find anything that I'm lacking by having it over my old unibody MBP (always use USB to connect my camera, and stopped using Firewire devices a year or so ago). It's made me rethink whether I even truly NEED the new MBP when it's refreshed (although I'll probably still get one for the heck of it), as I see now that 90% of the time I'm not doing anything intensive enough to need the extra horsepower that the new MBP will probably have. And at the very least I figure I can play with this for probably 6 months or more, and sell it for probably what I paid for it. Apple laptops have a great resell value in this area (Macbooks with the original Intel integrated graphics still fetch an easy $600 + all day long on Craigslist around here), so I figure getting close to the $840 i have in this won't be difficult at all if I decide to dump it.
