I tried out the beta of lightroom and think it is great, reasonably priced, software for the photographer who wants to organize photographs and apply a wide variety image adjustments. I just told my sister, who recently upgaded to a digital slr, to buy the program.
A few comments from my perspective. Lightroom is not a replacement for Photoshop (nor was intended to be). If you need to create layers, masks, or use repair tools to manipulate your image, then Lightroom will not get you what you want.
Lightroom does not get me as far as I want to go in color adjustment or correction of many UW images. Photoshop's ability to work in channels, ability to make paths and selections, and greater variety of tools are necessary IMO if you do a lot of work on UW images.
Many of the new and exciting Lightroom tools will be available in CS3 and the new ACR and Bridge when Adobe releases CS3 this spring. I have developed speed and a workflow in ACR that I could not duplicate in Lightroom (although in fairness the beta version was a lot slower than how you have described the final product). Also, Bridge serves my needs and I would not be using the extra power of Lightroom in this area.
My decision will be to take a pass on Lightroom and upgrade to CS3 when Adobe releases it.
Just MHO.
---Bob