The Tech Report reviews IE8 and finds the promised standards-compliant rendering engine underwhelming:

Look at Safari and Firefox, the two most popular browsers after IE. What do they have in common? Both deliver reliable browsing experiences with great rendering accuracy, great standards compliance, and a minimal amount of fluff.

[...]

Rather than make a great rendering engine first and slowly add new browser features on top of that, the IE team seems to have spent a disproportionate amount of time and effort on new functionality. What’s worse, those features add a kind of visual noise that makes IE8 feel like an incoherent mashup of buttons, menu items, and icons. If it had an automotive equivalent, it’d probably be “The Homer” from the Simpsons:

The Homer

That is a perfect analogy for what IE7 feels like to me. (Haven’t used the IE8 Beta yet.) Actually, it pretty much works for Windows generally, too.