I've had my phone now for about two weeks, and as a former iOS user, I'd say that this pretty much knocks it out of the park.
Smooth as butter interface, excellent app selection (I was worried about this, but the difference seems to be that Apple only approves the cream of the crop, while Android has the cream and all the milk underneath), great web browsing on Chrome, great Skype calling ability, great notifications, great inter-app operability (seriously, so many apps can be called up to interact with other apps) and so on and so forth. I'm loving it.
I can't speak to gaming; I'm not a gamer, but the screen is beautiful and the hardware seems pretty speedy, so it might be decent. I know it flies through Words w/ Friends.
As far as the SD slot, I was frustrated w/ it's absence before ordering the phone. The insane simplicity of cloud storage/access (I even rolled my own free cloud solution) means that I'm not going to be anywhere near needing more than 16GB on board.