Well, I went ahead and tried the 30-day free trial of Adobe CS6 Creative Cloud. For those of you who aren't familiar with Creative Cloud, if you are a licensed owner of any CS3 or higher suite you are eligible to download and install ALL of the CS6 Master Collection programs for only $29.99/mo (standard price is $49.99/mo). That's right, instead of paying the $1000-$1500 upgrade price for the boxed set of software, you can have it all for $30 bucks a month! Excellent move, Adobe! I installed it on the PC in my signature below, which is good but certainly not state-of-the-art by any means. And for reference, I'm moving up from Production CS4 and Design CS3.
Now, for my initial impressions:
It's fast! Not only do the programs launch much faster, they PERFORM faster! In InDesign CS3, I would have to wait a while for effects to preview onscreen, especially drop-shadows. Now, it's almost instant. Same with Photoshop filters & effects.
With Premiere CS4 I had to convert my AVCHD to Cineform AVI to have anything resembling a decent editing experience. Premiere CS6 takes the 44Mbit AVCHD from my hacked GH2 natively on the timeline and runs it as smoothly as DV on my old Pentium 4! I can only imagine how fast it would be if I had an Nvidia CUDA card for the Mercury Playback Engine to use. Tomorrow I'm going to experiment with some Cineform AVIs, because I love Cineform's First Light app which is like Lightroom for video.
Integration between programs is almost seamless in CS6. Last night I had Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Bridge all open simultaneously while working on a logo/business card/webpage header and moving between them was a dream! I didn't have to wait for a change in one to update in the others. I also had Premiere open so I could play around with some video files while brainstorming the design stuff. With CS3 & CS4 this would have bogged down my PC (if not crashed it!) but CS6 ran as smooth as glass on the very same hardware.
The various programs have also been revamped visually to present a more unified appearance, which makes it easier to transition between them.
It's only been a few days, and I've barely scratched the surface, but I'd highly recommend checking out the 30-day free trial. If you held off upgrading to CS5 or CS5.5, I think now is the time to move up. Adobe finally got their coding right for a 64-bit environment, and CS6 happily takes advantage of everything your PC's hardware has to offer.