ORION, that's ClearType and it's enabled by default. You can turn it off.
I find it strange everyone is giving IE7 such a hard time. They are doing a lot of innovative work in the interface and while it might take you time to adjust to it, it'll be for the better. IE7, as is Office 12, is moving away from the conventional (and highly non user friendly) "File/Edit..." toolbar, because many of the options available in it are either not relevant to the majority of your tasks, or are not used.
While they're doing, in my opinion, good work to the interface part, they also introduce some good enhancements to existing metaphors. Asa Dotzler, leader of Mozilla QA and Testing and co-founder of Spread Firefox, has
pointed out some of these in a recent blog post.
They're also doing good work in the standards compliance department. Still not as good as competitors, but they're at least doing something and increases support for standards originating from 1996 and 1998. While the Beta 2 Preview also introduces some bugs in its standards support, I think it's really good to see that they're actively working on the rendering engine and actively hacking away at it too...