I just got through playing for a few hours and so far I'm enjoying it, I haven't left the swamp yet but I've managed to help CS gain control of the road to the Cordon. I'm not sure what the big deal is with the difficulty but so far it hasn't seemed any worse than it's predecessor, I'm not playing at the hardest difficulty setting but comparatively it seems about the same so far. Seems okay performance wise for me so far at 1280x1024 under XP Pro with 2 gigs of ram and an AMD Opteron 180, and a 8800 GTS, the improved full lighting seemed just a bit sluggish so I dropped down to full dynamic lighting with everything else set high.
No crashes or other bad juju yet either.