Sorry, I read the thread fairly quickly and thought you mentioned it being the major reason for upgrading the device. And no, it's not a POS out of the box at all. But there is a night and day difference between stock and custom roms/tweaks/hacks. If it works as well for you than that's great, but I believe you are in the minority. As for hardware acceleration, I think HTC had more in mind then using it mainly for TF3D. Check out TF2D (HTC touch 3G?) if you can. I don't think there are any significant differences other than less "pretty" weather animations and fancier picture/mail flip animations (at least from what I remember from playing with a friend's custom vogue). I think TF3D is a step forward in terms of combining eye candy and getting away from a stylus in winmo phones but it does lack a bit of efficiency and customization in some areas. I'm sticking with it for now because it's enough for me. PointUI 2.0 looks promising though
