Current status: rocky. A few days ago I screwed up some critical configuration stuff and basically made my system unusable. While KDE is very tidy, I'm starting to feel like XFree86 is the elephant in the middle of the room -- if its config is broken, then KDE is broken too, and KDE can't help you configure it.

If KDE is going to seriously compete in the consumer space (and I really think it could), this X11 dilemma is going to need to be solved.