Looks like the Windows 7 build 6956 is already a lot better than Vista, even though the beta will not be released until the 13th of January. So some folks over at Softpedia released an immersive set of screenshots yesterday so we can all live the dream.
According to the article the current build works great – compared to Vista – on a virtual machine with 1.6 GB ram and an Intel Core Duo on 3 GHz. There is a benchmark gallery you might find interesting on ZDNet, not to mention the boot video if you haven’t seen it already.