I'm down in San Francisco at EclipseCon this week, and the first full day of the show is just wrapping up. I've been mostly tracking the RCP stuff. It's very different than a Microsoft show. For me the big difference that this is the first time I've attended a tradeshow. I've been to 10 or 12 TechEd's, PDCs, and whatnot, but I've always been a presenter, so now I guess I'm getting the other side of it, not only in role but in content.
As far as the show is concerned, it's a lot more free form than the MS shows, which makes sense given the culture. The show is almost devoid of an overall marketing message, which may be by design. Which is good because it makes it informal and a bit more "raw" which I like, but on the flipside, as an attendee (and specifically one who is fairly novice when it comes to Eclipse) the lack of a central message makes it hard to know what's key to focus on; all sorts of terms fly on by. Even the word "feature" has a slightly different definition in "Eclipsese". Maybe there will be more of that in the days to come. A nit pick: the talks also don't have much for demos in them either.
Now that I think about it, some of it messaging stuff might be a reflection of the differences in development model. Eclipse seems to focus on adding a steady stream of features in each release at relatively short intervals, versus the kind of big-bang model we use where we go off for longer and then have a smaller number of often larger feature additions, which might lend itself more easily to the model MS conferences tend to follow.