Well I finally got around to installing Solaris.
Overall impressions so far are exceptionally good. Installation would have been smooth but for a great deal of ****wittedness on my part ( I mislabelled the 5 CD-Rs which combined with problems reading them (burned on a PC with fast broadband ) resulted in a few weeks delay whilst I burned a new set after a great deal of swearing).
It did take quite a while to install though if you used a DVD rather than CD-R's you could just leave it running for a few hours.
I've been checking out the JDS rather than the CDE desktop so far and it seems to be remarkably easy to use for most workstation purposes. Havn't yet had to download a single application, had any problems reading office type files or had and crashes or other upsettings. No need for anti-spyware checkers, third party firewalls etc.
StarOffice 2.0 is out now which, from the reviews, seems to have fixed many of the problems from previous versions.
I've only scratched the surface and theres a whole lot more I'm going to have to do before I could give it a considered opinion but I havn't yet seen anything which would preclude Solaris from being used as a home PC (other than games at any rate).
It'll be interesting to see how difficult it is to set up networking etc.