That's what I wanted you (Linux users) to do in the first place:)
Everyone should come up with their hardware specs and then the areas they have tested and how they "feel" about the new version as compared to the old version, otherwise it's like a case of "a new shirt definately feels better than the old one..", which is rather obvious.
In general my understanding is that some changes will not be quite "obvious" to your "feelings" because they are not quite userland related and so have nothing to do with user experience!
I am a FreeBSD user, sorry to say so we have nothing much to talk about on the userland side of things because the OS is not a "Desktop"-type OS like Linux is, unless one used PCBSD. Even using PCBSD still will not make the user feel anything significant, bar for the few imaginations that it starts faster, better aesthetics because of improvements on the WM, but these are truly just perceptions. When FreeBSD version 7.x was released, the significant changes were
http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd7.html. Version 8.x is in the kitchen and the significant changes are
http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd8.html.
If you spend some time to go through those two, you will realize just how lost some of us are when you do your comparisons with Ubuntu version changes.