I find the Lightroom UI to be messy and showy rather than out of your way and functional...I much prefer Aperture, though Aperture needs to adopt core image filter support, then I'll hardly even need Photoshop except for fancy art-filters...

i like lightroom a lot. i have many presets that i installed with ease. i just wish there was a border (frame) plug-in for photos so i wouldn't always have to run to photoshop for that.

One word - Productivity - I have tried them all and there is not another application that handles nearly every aspect of the photographers workflow. A must have app in any serious photographers toolbelt.

Lightroom is simply one of the most wonderful apps I own. Fast and flexible, it makes managing my photo's a breeze, very powerful cataloguing, tagging and metadata handling. The Develop module simply rocks, awesomely powerful Adobe Camera Raw with twiddles on top allows great creative control. I've demoed Aperture, Bibble and Capture One but Lightroom has them beat overall.

Small thing, but it's now called "Photoshop Lightroom" (or maybe Adobe Photoshop Lightroom?).

The handling of RAW pictures is really simple and intuitive.
I can't compare it to Aperture or CS Bridge, but for a newbie in Digital Imaging it is
a really good tool which i never want to miss.
Sorting, comparing and selecting of images is simple (but powerful!).

Correction: orange adjustment is in 1.0. Bridge CS3 will have to try very hard to "compete". :-)

The 1.0 release of Lightroom is a joy. Between beta4 and 1.0 they added clone/heal, red-eye, and scrapped Shoots for real Folder management and auto-detection of moved/missing files. It has dramatically changed how I blow through 300-500 raw negs. There are still a few features in Bridge CS3 that haven't made it across (orange colour adjustment has a dramatic effect in greyscale), but it's worlds apart from Bridge in usability, and faster and more compatible than Aperture. And it's 43 MiB. Winner!

I really can't fathom why people are trying to compare this to iPhoto, when it's clearly a stab at Aperture... Regardless, after following it through its various betas, I have to take back my earlier comment... I'd say that Aperture and Lightroom are right on par with each other... Both have nice interfaces, each with their own advantages and disadvantages... If you're going to try either, I'd highly recommend trying both at once and really running them through their stuff before you commit to one.

Seems... eh. Good, but I'm not going to use it.

This is, of course, not to say that iPhoto is all that good either. But it does display things quickly, and it can show a LOT.