Scrolling is to user performance, what paging to disk is to system performance.

Or to look at it another way; screen area is to user performance what RAM is to system performance, i.e. one of the most significant resources.

So, does Windows 7 manage screen space effectively?

Or are there still lots of space-wasting big dummy graphics, tiny areas for unbounded content surrounded by large areas of static "UI grey", and the biggest curse of all - non-resizable dialogs containing unbounded material that doesn't fit within the allocated area?

A good usability-performance metric would be the number of scroll operations, vs. the more common metric of number of mouse clicks. How does Windows 7 fare there?