It's stable enough for general use. Its definitely not as snappy as XP, but it has its moments where it can at least make me let out a tiny "wow." There are a few glitches, but nothing worth mentioning. Pretty user friendly, I think, more than XP...but it can be annoying, which you need to be somewhat good with computers to work around stuff (UAC...ugh).
Gaming = no.
Thankfully you can boot into XP or Vista easily.
Try it out