If you used the Image Sharpening sparingly, it made things "pop", IMO. I only bumped it 3 notches, out of 20 notches, so you know I wasn't saturating the effect. My monitor isn't fuzzy or blurry, it's razor sharp, and IS gave it a minute enhancement. I found that 3 notches of IS helped bring textures alive in games, and it's a feature I miss with my 8800.
I've always stayed with NVIDIA because it had two features I used all the time: 3 notches of image sharpening and 5 notches of digital vibrance. When ATI released cards with color saturation in AVIVO, I thought about going with ATI because of their superior AF, but NVIDIA's IS held me back.
As for the 8800's having superior IQ: yes, it is technically true that 8800's have superior anisotropic-filtering and anti-aliasing to the previous generation of NVIDIA cards, but now they merely match the level of IQ already present in current generation ATI cards. As an earlier poster said, it aggravates me that video card companies drop features like this. They should be adding them, not removing them!
As things stand right now, the beta state of the 8800 driver support isn't looking too good. The current 97.44 have a seriously annoying fog problem with Source-engine games, and SC: Double Agent doesn't even work with 8800's. Plus, I thought NVIDIA's new anisotropic filtering method would eliminate the annoying texture shimmering present in 6x/7x series of cards, but that's still very much present. Why do video card review sites lie about stuff like this? They should post VIDEOS of games in action, so people can see the shimmering, because that kind of stuff is simply not present in still pictures.