Microsoft’s Virtual Earth service was launched today, but the service is worlds away from what you can find at Google Earth.
I tried browsing around several places, but the map scrolling is clunky and slow, several tiles fail to load, and when I zoom in on areas in California they don’t have any aerial photos of the areas I was looking at.
This service is pretty poor compared to TerraServer that they used to run, despite that it’s satellite imagery was black and white. I guess it’s early days, but Google Earth is still the ultimate in this area.