There’s an article on Rob Galbraith’s that has more information about Aperture. Some key points:
- Aperture’s RAW converter is based on the Mac OS X RAW converter (see iPhoto)
- Aperture’s Library is really a Mac OS X Package
- One Aperture Library at a time
- Aperture is designed for a single user
- The Library cannot span multiple hard drives
- Files that you “import” into the Library are copied to the Library package
- Exporting a RAW image does not export metadata
My image collection is currently at 313GB on a 1TB NAS box running RAID 5. That’s a limitation that I hope will get worked around in the future. I figured that Aperture would let you store your original images wherever you wanted, instead of placing them into a duplicate and separate location, ala iPhoto.
Aperture is a 1.0 product, and some of these points make it very clear. I’m sure that they’re iron them out in a year and a half when Aperture 2.0 is released. Until then, it’s up to the early adopters to suffer the growing pains of being on the leading edge.
Update: PDN has another good article on Aperture.
tow.com 
iView 3.0 has been released…kind of pricey at $99 for the upgrade, but I’m thinking that I’ll stick with it for a while since I’m having similar thoughts about waiting for v1.5 or 2.0 of Aperture, and if the Intel boxes are really going to be so astonishingly fast…I’ll wait to have my Mac with an Intel Inside. :)
I’m checking out the demo to iView 3.0. It’ll work for the next 21 days, which should be enough to see if the changes are worth the $99 upgrade fee. The website mentions that new catalogs created by 3.0 won’t work in 2.x and prior versions. I wonder if this is also true for catalogs created by 2.x and then resaved under 3.0. If this is the case, I’ll have to do all my evaluation on test catalogs.