Oddly enough, I noticed MSN Virtual Earth was up at tao of mac. I had been waiting for Virtual Earth since I saw early screenshots, so I had to take a couple minutes to jump to some 10 minute conclusions.

My first impression was missing tiles. Of course it just launched, so I expect slowness, but missing tiles are still annoying. I like the size of the browsing window.

Other things I Liked :
Scratch pad.. fancy mini-bookmarks
Quality of photographs.. Most of the photos from my local area are much higher quality.
Mouse wheel worked for zooming in both firefox and ie

Things I didn't like :
Zooming and moving just isn't as fluid as google.
Color photos would be nice.

Overall I gotta say, virtual earth is quite nice. When I just want to zoom around and have fun I think google earth will still take the cake for now, but for utility I think I might find myself using virtual earth more then google maps. Congrats to the virtual earth team on launching a great new product!

Looks like there is already a site up dedicated to developers and virtual earth.. Excellent.. ViaVirtualEarth