as i started this thread asking people what they had done and all, i thought i'd post up my own experience.
rooted my phone earlier today and installed the sense ui. i have no intention of running this rom long term until it goes at least into beta, it's got far too many problems.
i don't know if this was my own mistake(this was my first time, total android n00b, as you guys have probably picked up from my other posts in the rooting section), but when i first installed the rom, i was stuck on the splash screen. it said that it installed fine, but it would sit on that splash for at least 20min. probably longer if i had let it. my first thought was that i had installed a corrupted rom, but when i wiped it and reinstalled the rom, i booted fine.
the only issues i've come across have been trying to use the nav, the gps never updates. haven't visited modaco to see if this is a known issue or not yet.
as far as what i don't like(and at this point i've only played with the sense ui for about 20-30m, so this list may grow) is the integration of twitter and facebook into the friendstream. nevermind that i don't want to see the two together, i don't want to be posting the same thing to twitter as i do to twitter. probably going to want to cook a custom rom and get rid of this.
i'll update this as i go.