Some things I really like about the new media player:

• It is a LOT faster. I have at least 15,000 songs I’ve ripped from my large CD collection. WMP 10 took far too long enumerating albums and songs.
• The instant search may become my primary way of finding specific music to listen to.
• I like the tile view — it makes the experience of picking music to play sort of like browsing a physical array of CDs. I have so much music that I often don’t know what I want to listen to–browsing is essential.
• Very intuitive–I figured out how to navigate among the new views very easily.
• The shuffle/repeat options is much more prominent on the play-control bar. I switch shuffle on and off constantly.