Windows 7 is fairly advanced as far as the UI goes. Microsoft spent a lot of time and money researching interfaces and branding for Vista. Aero is the new windows brand. You see those aurora patterns, you think Windows (that's the idea).
Windows is so widely used, that it's quite easy to develop branding. Luna (the XP theme) became a big part of the XP brand. You could recognise it at a glance and know it was XP. Aero hasn't done so well because Vista hasn't done as well as XP (from a marketing perspective).
Windows 7 won't depart dramatically from Aero. It's Windows' Aqua. Aqua's been tweaked between revisions, but between each, you could still see it was the same UI philosophy. I actually find Aero oddly attractive sometimes.
I played around with some internal Longhorn builds and demos (most of which were made in Flash. I can go over the Longhorn story if anyone's interested). Microsoft have some really smart people working for them, even if it doesn't always show in their products. Things like WinFS and the original Sidebar - they were huge. They show the kind of forward-thinking that almost makes you sympathise with their dominance.
WinFS was not just a filesystem. The computer actually knew what files where. File formats were replaced by XML schemas, and it was all perfectly integrated. You could be on a phone call with John (and the computer would know it's John, and who John is), and it'd show you recent emails, IMs, collaborated documents, and filter them by context using speech recognition. You could tag things easily from the sidebar. You didn't have folder hierarchies - you'd tell the computer to show you all photos with You and Jenny in them, in that simple language, and it'd just do it. The computer thought about data as you think about your data. Not by file names or folders, but by content. You can do this with metadata, but I consider that a 'tacked-on' solution. WinFS was built for this kind of stuff. Unfortunately running a relational database server for all disk queries turned out to limit performance somewhat, and it was scrapped.
The Sidebar was much more than a Dashboard rip-off. It was design to solve the problem of data being somewhere in the cloud in different services. All your information would be aggregated in to one place. Applications could use it, too. So in one place, you could see your upcoming appointments, web-based emails, orders from Amazon, CD burning status...etc. All the information scattered across applications and web services would be aggregated. I'm not sure why this was scrapped. I know the current Sidebar was close to being scrapped right up until release. One high-level executive had faith in it, though, and it was kept. The Sidebar team then became part of Windows Live (for whatever reason), and was eventually just disbanded.
If these concepts see some life in Windows 7, I'll buy it. I'll only ever buy another copy of Windows if there's some true technological progress.
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