So, I spent the week messing around with SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and I'll have to say, I'm really impressed.
Installation: I got it up and running on a VMWare virtual Win 2003 server on my development machine here at work. Setup was easy and straightforward. I spent around three hours swapping various disks, etc. Overall pretty painless.
Creation of Portal Web Part. I created the following Web Part in about 2 and 1/2 days, re-using our back-end VIT framework here for managing container statuses:
The development process was what I expected, and was a breeze. Anyone familiar with creating ASP.NET Custom controls will have no problem. Good documentation from MS helped, and installation worked like the docs said.
I then spent some time setting up a bug tracking web part, basing it on the out-of-the box portal list part. That was really cool! I created a pretty full-featured bug tracking app in about 30 minutes! The guy that sits next to me was laughing because I just kept saying WOW! This is really cool!
Now, I'm not sure how long this honeymoon period will last, but I'm pretty psyched about it so far!
-Brendan