Setting Up My New Retina MacBook Pro

I'm spending some time this evening setting-up my new Retina MacBook Pro (rMBP). Here are some initial thoughts and notes:

1. Migration Assistant, the utility that copies all your apps, documents and settings from one Mac to another, took about three hours to copy about 160 GB over a gigabit Ethernet cable connected directly between the two computers.
2. Migration Assistant didn't turn on FileVault on the new rMBP, even though I use it on my old MBP. It took about an hour to encrypt everything while I played around and surfed.
3. The retina screen, contrary to my previous thoughts, really looks great—much better than I expected it to. I have retina screens in my iPhone and iPad, but for some reason they don't really stand out as being so super-sharp like the big 15" screen does.
4. The down-side of this is that it's very obvious when an app isn't using the "official and proper" way to display text, as it appears fuzzy compared with apps that do things the right way. Yes, Twitter, I'm looking at you.
5. I already like the thinner base of the rMBP, compared with my old 13" MBP. It's not as stressful on my wrists, and the larger wrist-pad area of the 15" helps, too.
6. It's fast enough to make even the TypePad editor snappy.
7. Migration Assistant didn't copy over my printer setup, but the Print & Scan preferences pane was quick to find my Lexmark 544dn printer on the network and quite happy to download the latest drivers for it. Unfortunately, something didn't work right and the print spooler would get stuck on "Copying print data" any time I tried to print. This step would peg my CPUs until I canceled the print job. After some Googling the answer seemed to be to setup the printer using the HP Jetdirect option instead of Bonjour. This worked, although I'm disappointed that this problem happened at all. Not sure who deserves the blame here, Apple or Lexmark?
8. This is my first Mac with Lion (10.7) already installed on it, so it's my first experience with the recovery partition. After setting-up the EFI password, I only get prompted for the password if try to boot from the recovery partition (Cmd-R). If I let the system boot normally I go straight to the OS X login screen. With my old Mac, which lacks the recovery partiton, any cold boot of the system will first require the EFI password.
9. My Win7 virtual machine running under Parallels got quite a boost, going from one to four CPUs and from 3 GB to 4 GB of RAM. I used to get a 2.5 Windows Experience Index under the old setup, with the main bottleneck being the graphics performance. Now I get a 5.2 Windows Experience Index, with the bottleneck being gaming graphics. Processor performance went from 4.5 to 7.5, which wasn't surprising, but I was surprised that RAM went from 5.6 to 7.9, and that the SSD performance remained the same at 7.3.
10. Lotus Notes is still pretty piggy. [sigh]

One other item about the rMBP vs. the regular one: the cost. Lots of folks are remarking on the extra cost of the retina version, but when I ran the numbers the two were within a couple hundred dollars of each other if you bought a base MBP and upgraded it with a 480 GB SSD and 16 GB of RAM from Other World Computing. So, for a couple hundred bucks you get the gorgeous retina display. Seems like a good deal to me.