I'm also very pleased with the Zune. I bought one over a month ago and finally got around to messing with it early this week. Same thing; had I known how polished and solid the interface was, I'd have picked one up earlier.
1. Haven't set up my Zune profile, so I don't have any suggestions on the first one.
2. I'm pretty anal-retentive about my music collection, so I've already added cover art to most of my albums . I'll give it a look this holiday weekend and see what the Zune software does with some of my more obscure stuff...
iTunes had a similar problem with not updating cover art within the MP3 file... there was some workaround but I can't remember exactly what... I ended up deleting the songs from iTunes and reimporting them.
I particularly like the "song list" to see what is coming up next (mine is on perpetual shuffle), and the option to jump to the album if an artist comes up during shuffle or playlist that you like... I had always wanted these two features in my iPod, and they never came.
Started entering details for my Zune profile, and under "status," I was going to enter "working on an iPod -> Zune accessory converter" but apparently "This text contains a restricted word or phrase."
And that's the negative. No quality accessories for the Zune. I just want a simple car charger which provides line-out from the dock connector. They exist for the iPod, why not the Zune?
Oh well, time will tell.