Except Y! Unlimited actually deserves the hype.
The player (or engine as Yahoo calls it) is very impressive and definitely has the potential to replace windows media 10 as my default player and library manager. Its got all the features your used to seeing in the most popular music players and the interface very closely resembles music match (without the bloat). I'm hoping, that since this product is still beta, they will still be adding more features as it nears release. Most importantly for me are more robust tagging, a mini or task bar player (best feature of wm 10), and good plug-in support (which shows a lot of promise already).
The service is the most innovative yet, imo. Much easier to use and more intuitive than Napster and, considering the 4.95/month (if you pay annually) price tag, makes itunes, msn, and others nearly obsolete. The only thing itunes still has on the competition is its very large selection, but my guess is that napster and yahoo will soon match or top it.
With all that said, this is still a drm'ed music service. In other words, if you want to own (yeah right) the song you'll have to pay $.79 a track for the privilege of playing the music on 3 machines or burning it to cd a specified number of times. god... just typing that is ridiculous. No one will every be able to convince me that drm is a good thing, I guess I'm just too rational a person to understand such nonsense.