I was a little surprised you could download this without a, you know, Zune, but no complaints. It's a bit on the light side being only 34 megs. Installation was quick and easy - even did it while playing City of Heroes (ahem). It told me my graphics card might not support some of its advanced display options (waaa?), and that was it.
Man, this thing is simple. Mac simple. It gave me the choice to do things one way or the other, saying very plainly what they were. It found my music easily, and really was just plain brainless. So simple a Mac user could do it.
The player itself is nice; worlds ahead of Windows Media Player in terms of immediate usability. The interface is clean, simple, almost elegant. When viewing your music collection, you can do the whole shift/control click thing to select multiple items (as normal). Funny thing - left and right side columns are lists, but the center column is nothing but album covers! Weird. Its not as easy to sort things as it is in iTunes, though. Making playlists simply involves dragging songs or albums to the Playlist icon; moving music to a Zune or to burn to CD is the same. Overall, its nice. Much better than WMP, but not quite iTunes.
Along the top are your main options (tabs, basically); collection, device, marketplace, social. Pretty easy to understand. When you click on one, its sub-options come up too; music, playlists, videos, pictures and podcasts show up for collection and device (device gets status too). The marketplace isn't bad, and I love the fact they sell DRM-less stuff too in MP3 format. Again, nice and easy, but iTunes is still a bit better here for finding stuff. Not messing with social because, well, I ain't ;)
Overall it seems really nice; quick, clean, simple. I doubt its as light as Winamp, but likewise, don't think its the hog iTunes is, either. One of the things I realized with my Sansa is the software end of things is massively important to me, hence my constant staring back at iTunes. But the Zune stuff? I think I can work with this. Its easily what Windows Media Player *should* be. Maybe the next WMP will slim down some - it would certainly promote the use of non-iTunes music players among those who aren't technically inclined. In fact, to be honest, I'd have to say this might actually be better for basic computer users than iTunes, and that's saying something. I'm pleased with it, in all honest. My brother joked "Its basically an Apple product made by Microsoft," and its not too far off. With this as the software end, I think i could actually see myself considering a Zune of some sort, or at least debating a Zune vs iPod. The iPod Touch might be the coolest thing out there, but I'm not paying those prices; given that you can get a (cheap) original Zune and upgrade its firmware to be the same as the new ones, or just get a flash Zune (comperable to the iPod Nano), things are good.
That being said, I'd still recommend iTunes/iPod to 99% of the people I know :P
Actual reviews of the Zune media player and software: