An improvement. Definitely still a beta, but an improvement.
Plusses:
- painless upgrade once I'd signed up (and the signup prompt was more obvious than I expected in Store -> My Account)
- Amazon App Store. Thank you. (note: you need to go to the Amazon app store website to get this)
- More icons on the desktop
- Maybe a little peppier, wouldn't swear to it
- Dev tools

Minuses
- still no native screen password-lock (but the security apps from the store work nicely)
- hibernate issue (pop the battery on an EE to reset; if you use ES Security Manager you may need to relaunch it afterward)
- at least one video codec now plays greyscale
- the context-sensitive "enter" key on the onscreen keyboard ("go", "search", "next", etc.) routinely doesn't work, and I end up with 'l' instead. Not a touch calibration issue, as that region of screen works fine otherwise. odd.
- one instance of app instability; wouldn't surprise me if there's more, but its not killing the system either.

Overall, from an Android usability/progress/compatibility standpoint, I'm glad to be on a Froyo platform. As a generic user, the biggest improvement is the app store, which is worthwhile on its own, but having seen the install process, I'm not 100% convinced it would not have worked on Dingo. My current assessment is that if you like grokking tech, go ahead and get Ermine, but it's not ~such~ a world of improvement that everyone should jump on the beta as if it's the current standard OS. If you want a device that just works, it might be best to stick with Dingo until Ermine goes gold.