This was my first experiment with PDFLaTeX and figures.
It didn't work out too well:
(1) I stayed up -very- late fixing it
(2) You can't (without doing a -lot- of work, which I couldn't) get
  other fonts in figures -- it's a big pain.
(3) The lines produced by MetaPost are thicker.

That said, generally pdftex is really nice, works fast, and produces
very nice margins.
...but the figures suffer a little -- bwah!!