Well, I just exhausted the demo time limit, and my interest is piqued.
On my hopelessly-outclassed rig I got my usual 20-26 fps at the very low default settings (with lots of framerate-jumping),and at near-max settings it looked beautiful (water especially) but yielded about 2 fps. 
The easy flexibility of the new view modes is very nice, but I'm not so sure about the visually-indicated g-effects... I doubt that changing the prop setting by 100rpm either way in the Beaver would knock your head around like that in RL. And in general, the head movement they're trying to simulate , whether one is accelerating/decelerating or turning, distracts more than it enhances realism. In RL, these sensations are felt rather than seen... they may have been better off leaving that alone; it's a very, very subtle thing that's nearly impossible to model without actual motion. But I'm sure that's tweakable, or it could be disabled.

VC cockpits look fantastic, but so do some of the default FS9 VCs.

I'm planning to start my next build this month; still building for FS9, but I think it might run FSX pretty well, even without Vista.

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I'm going to build another computer, not a flightsim model... I may never have the time or patience for making flight sim models, but I agree, it's a cool thing to do.

If we want good graphics I guess we just have to pay for them. There is simply not an option otherwise if one wants to get a better sim then it must come with a better rig. I'm just going to try the demo on my laptop in an hour or so and see how it compares with the big PC.

I can get moderately good settings for it to be playable but it still looks s**t, I agree it looks good on full settings though.

I quite like the head movements when you accelerate etc.

.Mic

My rig is a laptop and it has the following:

P4 2.4GHz
512MB Ram
ATI Radeon 9700 with 64MB using the latest Omega Drivers

My rig runs pretty with at least 15 FPS with the highest mesh settings and "NO" autogen or scenery objects. But once the autogen it turned "on" my rig begins to struggle.

I also have a desktop but it's hardware is limited:

P4 2.4 GHz
512MB Ram
Nvidia GeForce 4 MX440 with 128MB.

However, even with the latest video drivers, the video card will never cut it because it's "not even" DX9 compatible and I doubt that the motherboard would be compatible as well.