I'm assuming these would apply to the SD DVR as well.

Good:

• Multiple tuners - I can record two shows at once
• All digital pipeline - Digital channels are recorded directly.
• Digital sound - Lots more Dolby digital than I thought there would be.  Sounds great.
• HD - duh.  Seems like everything is being up-converted to 1080i.

Bad:

• Not very responsive - Tivo solved this by providing audio feedback of button clicks.  The picture didn't immediately respond, but you had almost immediate feedback of stuff.  Overall the interface is more sluggish.
• Transport controls suck - Tivo had a small jump backwards at the end of a fast-forward since you can't react fast enough.  It doesn't appear to have that feature.
• Tivo's interface was all about giving you access to your shows.  This interface is about cramming lots of information down your throat and making you weed through it with inadequate tools.  You have to wade through the guide to find shows, or attempt to browse by the first letter of the shows for a given day in a list that's not quite alphabetized correctly.  I never had to know what channel or showing time, or even the name of my shows with Tivo.  That is a necessity for this machine.
• Since everything is being converted to 1080i, my TV is locked in HD mode, which doesn't give me alot of control over the geometry of the picture. That's a shortcoming of my TV, but some of the HD channels are bizarrely stretched, and some channels seem to have the field order reversed, or the fields scaled oddly and it makes them unwatchable.  The Fox HD channel is that way when it's scaling SD content like the Simpsons.  They look much better on the SD station.
• Tools for managing your scheduled recordings are practically non-existent.
• The remote has no enter key, forcing you to wait for the entry to “take“ or by typing 0, 0, 0, 2 to get to channel two.
• In order to see what shows are recording, you have to scroll through the list of scheduled recordings to get the details and find the ones with the “rec“ indicator.  There's also no easy way to delete shows or manage recording priorities.

The list goes on.  I'm sure you're tired of hearing me complain, but I just thought it might aid some other people in their decisions, or help people who think Time Warner's hardware is good to see the light.  Maybe someone at Time Warner will come across this as well and take it as good feedback.