From what I've seen, the initial performance of the board is very impressive, but I do worry in one department. For the most part, the 6800 has caught up to ATI on image quality, but shader quality is still sub-par as shown here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/...e_6800-46.html
My concern is this, if they are currently only matching the Radeon 9800XT in terms of image quality, a board that is at least one generation behind the 6800 in virtually all regards, how will they fare against ATI's new board? Performance is anyone's guess, but I think it's very likely that ATI may beat them again on general rendering quality.