Xbox 360's new Xbox Live, HD Netflix streaming

After five days with a beta version of the "New Xbox Experience" -- the upgraded guide you see when you turn on the console -- I'm still not in a position to fairly review it, since I haven't used close to all the features. I still haven't formed a "party" to play online, since none of my friends i play with are on the beta, nor have I done any extensive online shopping and downloading. What can I say so far?

-Having not gone into a party so far, my avatar feels pretty pointless. He's just kinda standing around on the "my profile" box on screen.
-The options for creating my avatar were disappointingly limited. Since this isn't a realistic 3-D world like Sony's "Home," I would prefer to make my guy look really crazy and dress him up in gear from my favorite games. Reportedly an "avatar store" is coming in the spring, but for now the craziest thing I could do is give him a monocle and Vulcan ears. Also, while the avatars don't look exactly like Mii's, the sound effects while creating and using them are disturbingly Wii-like.
-Finding information about a game and it's available downloadable content is much easier. You can get everything about a game in one place, instead of having to find it in separate categories for videos, DLC, pics, etc.
-Microsoft is able to feature more content, be it DLC, online events, or new features, since the number of "items" in each category scrolls pretty far horizontally. But you can't see as much, since each content box is bigger and most of it is stacked to the right off screen. This is especially true if you have more than a few friends online at once.
-Ads are more intrusive now, inserted into horizontal rows of content with just as much prominence as the actual Xbox Live features.
-The new "Xbox Guide" is the best friend of experienced gamers. Just click that big X button and you get a simplified, purely text version of the old "blades" with everything that used to be on the launch screen. And you can get it while still in the middle of the game. If you know what you're looking for, it's much simpler than navigating through the 3-D graphics of the NXE.

For a much fuller exploration of NXE, check out Joystiq's video tour.

Also, while I haven't gotten to try Netflix on Xbox 360 yet, I was surprised and impressed to read that we'll be able to stream HD content. There's only 300 titles so far, according to Engadget, but that's still 300 more than Microsoft had said would be possible as of E3. A very promising development.