Trying Out Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac (Slowly)

I have been trying out Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac for the last week or so, and have a few comments, for those considering the move to the new office suite:

FIRST, THE POSITIVES

• The built-in template documents are professional looking, I must admit.
• I also like the new cover pages that are a click away in Word. Cover pages are just one of those things I don't want to have to design by myself, and it is nice that there are some good design defaults for this.
• I like the new approach to the floating formatting palettes, which are much more like Adobe's applications now. Even though it feels derivative (gee, what a surprise - Microsoft being derivative!) it is nice to have a consistent experience between the Office applications.

I liked the new formatting palettes - which are a lot like Adobe's

NOW, THE NOT-SO POSITIVES

• It feels slow to me.  Mighty slow, sometimes.  Compared to the original Office (I never had Office 2004, just the original version), some operations feel twice or three times as slow, even simple things such as highlighting or drag and drop.
• It crashes far too frequently.  The first few days of using Office 2008, I find myself having to re-open applications that shouldn't be crashing (such as Excel, which rarely crashed before) with alarming frequency.
• It took up a ridiculous amount of space on my hard drive when I installed it.  After loading it, I had to go delete gigabytes of other data just in order to run any of my programs.
• Sometimes even simple things don't feel, well...intuitive.  I find myself scratching my head (or chin) at times, wondering...now, I wonder where I go to do that?  An upgrade shouldn't feel this way.

I suppose if I/when I upgrade my Mac (I am running a PowerBook G4), some of the speed issues may go away, but I must say I am overall disappointed at the performance and usability of this new suite of Office tools.