It's always interesting to read comments bashing Microsoft (including the typical $ instead of S), regardless of the accuracy of the comments.

Office 2008 (12.0) was released. It had bugs. Some have been fixed. More will be fixed as long as people report them to Microsoft.
Since it was announced over a year ago that there will be no support for VBA with this version, I also kept my 2004 version. This was no surprise, although it is a shame.

I have not used Office 2008 extensively, but I have found no stability problems, launch speed seems adequate at 10 seconds or so per application, and I have had no crashes with any application. iWork applications launch faster, at 6 seconds or so on my system.

I began posting comments for each application, but the post became too long. So just to address the previous review:
I can open Events in Entourage by double-clicking. For one Event I was asked whether I wanted to open all events or a single occurrence given that it was a recurring event. I had no problems opening it. For another Event, I double-clicked and it opened. I'm considering an Event as an appointment or occurrence on my calendar.

The "STUPID Elements Gallery toolbar" is quite useful and a time-saver for many tasks, and people can add their custom Elements. Definitely a time-saver for many.
The toolbar is almost 5 millimeters in height in my display, or just a bit taller than my cursor. A little less than 2% of the screen space occupied by Word on my system, and shorter than a regular toolbar. I would like to have an option to remove it or add it as I do with other toolbars, but I would not call it "a giant waste of screen real estate" especially since it expands and contracts with a single mouse click.

Microsoft has a long list of known issues with the 2008 version, which people can find here:
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/help.mspx

Despite the loss of VBA, it has been a decent upgrade. So far PowerPoint has allowed me to view presentations that used to crash with 2004. Entourage has issues with rules and categories that have been easily fixed. I've opened large documents with Word, 1 and 2 MB in size, as fast as Pages but Pages messed up the formatting. I opened a 2 MB Excel file with 56 Charts and many Megaformulas and it worked smoothly. Overall, my INITIAL impressions are positive in spite of the current issues with Office 2008.
I decided to post this "early" review to give current and/or potential users a different perspective.
My rating for the price is based on the promo I used. Microsoft has offered some serious discounts, even making the Special Media Edition available for around $40. Too bad I missed that one!

If you need VBA, keep a copy of Office 2004.