Not when you have a 24'' LCD they aren't ;)
And what do you mean click 2 or 3 times ?
If i have, say, 5 open tabs in IE, a roll over on the ie icon will bring up the 5 thumbs in the bar. From there, a roll over on one of the thumbs will bring that tab up, and one click is all you need if you wish to keep it up.
Or are you talking about something else and i'm missing it ? I'm fairly new to Win7 myself so it's possible we're talking about different things.

I kind of like the grouping. I open a bunch of windows at once, so it's nice to have the same program's windows stacked on top of one another.

This post intrigued me, so I went out and did a bit of research. ;-)
More features does not equal no competition. But actually, Google Docs does have features unavailable in the free version of Office 2010 such as table of contents, equation editing, footnotes(!), annotations, a drawing tool (which makes sense, because Word uses PowerPoint integration for that, iirc), and bookmarks. I may be missing a few of them.
(I wasn’t sure whether to include document translation in that list. Office sort of has this? It literally just copies and pastes the document into microsofttranslator.com; it’s a really lazy "implementation", and there’s no way to get the translated document back together except with manual copy and paste. It looks like it’ll break things in documents with complicated formatting.)
This has been an option with all the office software I mentioned for years.
“The real thing”? Microsoft Office is A, not THE, office suite. There have been more popular suites before it, and there will be more popular suites after it. OpenOffice.org compatibility is actually pretty decent with Microsoft Office (I haven’t had issues with your average Word document for several years), and it’s got a heckuva lot more functionality than this Office Starter thing.
No they don’t, not even close. That really doesn’t look like very many features at all to me. Unless it’s going to dramatically improve by release? Although “beta” implies that it’s feature complete, and the Microsoft apps I’ve seen in beta haven’t gained many features before they released.
That is nice. Although, it’s not an issue with Google Docs or AbiWord, the latter of which actually allows you to edit the document collaboratively without switching to a web-based interface (there is no web-browser editing or one-click export to Google Docs though, which is admittedly rather lame). I use Dropbox for my insta-sync fix.
Additionally, the Microsoft Office implementation of this in the beta is highly flawed; to sync seamlessly with SkyDrive, you seem to have to save documents in a specific system-selected folder. On my system the folder path was “C:\Users\James\AppData\Roaming\NVD\{20140066-0066-0409-0000-0000000FF1CE}”. This location isn't even added to the Windows 7 documents library. Good luck copying your document onto a flash drive. :-P
So, wait. Existing office suites are no competition, but you’re not even sure if Office 2010 cloud (which competes head to head with free services) is free?
I’m not saying that Office 2010 Starter might not be great. I’m saying it’s not as great as you think it is.

I've gotta question this claim a bit. In terms of overall functionality MS Office does have quite a few features that OpenOffice lacks, but these are almost entirely features you'd only see being put to use in an enterprise setting, which I'm guessing isn't the target demographic for the starter edition of MS Office. The folks who'd be using the starter edition are more along the lines of kids typing up their school reports, people doing the occasional resume writing, etc. Basically tasks where the feature sets being used overlap completely between MS Office and Open Office.
As for compatibility, could you clarify what you mean by that a bit? I've been using Open Office for a couple of years at home, and haven't run into any problems opening MS Office documents from work on it (and vice versa). There may be some document functionality that causes issues, but I'm guessing that will go back to my first point. Additionally, considering that Open Office defaults to ODF while newer versions of MS Office default to OOXML I'd expect more compatibility issues to spring from the latter than from the former when dealing with additional programs aside from just MS Office and Open Office.

Yeah you can roll over it, but then you have to move your mouse again to get to the thumbnails.
You can click to open up thumbnail viewer. So by two or three clicks, you have to click the stack, and click a thumbnail while moving your mouse all over the place.
I'd rather go straight to the window I want on the taskbar.

Yeah, it seems like the new taskbar is designed for touch screens. It doesn't seem as usable as the old setup for a regular keyboard and mouse situation.

Fair enouhg mate, we all have our own preferences, but i really get the felling we must be talking about different things after all, because that's really not how it's working on my end.
If i roll over a stack of 5 ie tabs, i get the corresponding thumbs. Zero clicks so far.
If i then move the pointer over any of the thumbnails, i bring up the corresponding tab. I can move from thumb to thumb and each time i bring up the corresponding tab. Still zero clicks so far.
And finally i'll only need a single click to keep up whatever tab i have up in front at the time from a stack. So, one click to get from a stack to any particular window from that stack fixed up front. Not 2 or 3, one.

Huh? I love new taskbar with mouse and keyboyard. But that's probably 'cause I have always dozens of windows open

Yeah, you can do that. You can click the stack thing if you want to. But either way, it's too much mouse movement for me.

I got Win7Pro a few weeks back, makes all previous Windows OS's feel inferior by a large margin while still running fast. It's even surpassed Linux in every way except speed, and it only lost by a little bit.

???
any application that I minimize to system tray disappears from the taskbar (steam, yahoo, skype,...). The only way it can stay there is if you have the program pinned to the taskbar. It seems you don't really use the system the way it is supposed to be used :) But this is all personal preference... I fell in love with the new taskbar the moment I saw it :) I really like the idea of using only the icons for identification of programs (the only feature that I miss is to hide the icon name on the desktop itself :) (for now I have to use the ALT+255 "blank" symbol in the place of icon name)
Also... how many people found the background slideshow feature? I've put about a 100 pictures from interfacelift.com (awesome site) into one folder and set it to change the background every three minutes :) (and didn't notice any slowdowns even when I had only 1GB of RAM).
In the end, do you remember the Windows XP hate syndrome, after that system came out? :D History repeating itself :)
aaaanyway. There is one thing that seems very fishy to me :) Vista came out, everybody starting screaming "craaaaaaaaaaaap"... so much hate went down on that system (I think it was excellent). Now, Win7 comes out, which is basically Vista with a new taskbar and suddenly... everybody loves the new system :D Sigh, the power of media and marketing :))

Note that you can also use RSS feeds. The only exception is that the feed has to be set up in such a way that it is linking to the images themselves (if it's linking to description pages or whatnot Windows can't see the images correctly).

Nope. It's there whether pinned or not. Until you edit the registry to put it into the system tray. For some reason, running it in XP or Vistaster compatibility mode doesn't work for this either. It definitely needs a reg tweak to "enable" removal from the task bar - which, unless you're used to, and know exactly what you're doing, the Average Joe is not going to go near, or risk completely killing their OS.
I found the slide-show ^_^ I actually like it :P The pictures it uses, at least the system default choices it gives you are quite good quality, too. I'm flicking between landscapes and UK scenes.
The XP hate wasn't nearly as foetid, nor long-lived as the Vistaster hate, at least in the circles I worked in...and for good reason. I went from W95 to W98 to W95+Plus Pack, to 2K. Didn't really rate W98 as being not really an improvement over 95 (Hell, W95+Plus pack did everything 98 did, and threw in a few extras at the same time). Never went near ME, but 2K wasn't too bad, if clinical and sterile (almost as bad as NT4 in austerity), and from there to XP Pro. Loved XP as being a cross between 2K and 95, but working very well, and being (at lest in Pro-edition) highly customisable and easy to use to restrict some areas for some users. ME2:Vistaster (Borked Edition) was another I didn't go near. I played with it for around 2 hours on some work machines, but it didn't get within 15 miles of my personal machine.
I'm not about to uninstall W7, but I'm also not about to throw out my XP Pro disc either...W7 at least works (compared to ME2 : Vistaster), and until I get some time to throw some stress tests at it on my machine, and then throw my rather skilled abilities in breaking things at it, it'll do for just being very shiny and pretty :P

Any program not designed to use the new taskbar will still minimise to the tray (like steam and most non-microsoft instant messagers), Windows Live Messenger is one of the few apps that are updated to use the 7 taskbar instead. I assume some of them will be updated within a few years as users and developers get used to 7.