Yeah, there are plenty of cracks to get around that.
However, piracy aside I've had the official "preview" 180 day trial of Windows XP installed on my home machine (PII 400/128Mb/GeforceII) for over a month now and am astonished to report that the system hasn't crashed ONCE. Bearing in mind this is an early build that's pretty impressive as I've been pushing the thing a bit.
The only flaws I've found so far are relatively minor and liable to be fixed with better drivers upon release (UDF formatted CD support is poor; my network card only works with certain media types; XP won't let me use a proprietary Epson scanner driver for my transparancy adaptor).
On the positive side this OS is distinctly quicker than Windows 2000 in operation and boot time, and as mentioned it's extremely stable. I couldn't get the hang of the new screen/start menu format, but reverting to the traditional look is easy! Gaming wise I've installed Flight Sim 2k, Hidden and Dangerous and Unreal Tournament - all of which perform as well as they ever had under 98/ME, and better than under Win2k.
Overall a big thumbs up though, I think given the state of this build the initial release will be of a decent standard and I'd wait until you can get it bundled with a new PC.
Also, as I understand it the "hardware change" thing is not calculated on changes-per-year but upon amount of change. I think the average homebuilt enthusiast who regularly changes graphics cards, upgrades CD-drives and memory and so on over time has nothing to fear, however a full processor/motherboard upgrade may require a visit to the Microsoft site for a "reauthorisation", which I think is pretty painless.