In spite of everything discussed there WinFS Beta 1 already delivered much of the things promised. If you have an access to MSDN Subscriptions you may download WinFS Beta 1 TR bits and try them with Windows XP. WinFS works perfectly well.
However there are some problems with WinFS as the product.
The first problem is that while Avalon changed presentation model in a little (say you can still use Win Forms and even Win32 apps in Windows Vista) WinFS would change the data layer and data access dramatically.
