is this ready for Joe Schmoe consumer, a guy like me with negligible computer programming skills, who needs things like Flash, Skype (I live in Europe and this is my primary means of international communication), MS Office, easy access to printers and so forth.
Since you seem to think you need windows only software, no, eCS will not do what you seem to think that you need. However:
Flash - there is a buggy beta 10 version, so far. It is still being worked on, but needs more funding. There is MediaDownloader that will download FLASH files, and then you can play most of them in SMPLAYER/MPLAYER.
Skype - Not much hope that this will ever work with eCS, unless you can convince Microsoft (they apparently bought Skype) to release the source, or port it themselves (yeah, right).
MS Office - Open Office 3.2 is available (comes with eCS 2.0 and later). It is not 100% compatible, but does a good job. It is still missing the JAVA connection, but that should be corrected when JAVA 1.6 is finished (still needs more funding).
Printer support is now done with eCUPS, which has some serious limitations, but works well with supported printers. You do need to carefully select your printers.
You also need to carefully select your system hardware, or you will likely need to take a crash course in being a technical person.
The bottom line is, that eCS is still trying to catch up, but if you insist on using Microsoft software, you don't have any hope of getting it to work with eCS. If you are willing to do some work to install eCS (which may require some technical expertise), and then find software that will do what you need to do, and learn how to use it, you can probably switch to eCS. If you are not willing to do that, you might as well suffer with Win7. You can always keep an old system around to run things like Skype.
My suggestion, if you really want to use eCS, would be to buy a preloaded system from one of the companies who sell preloaded systems. If you also get a printer from them, it will probably work. Add OpenOffice to handle the MS Office stuff that you need to handle, and ask for specific suggestions about what software to use for other things.
Hope this helps...