Reporting back with some positives and negatives.
Positives:
The battery life is absurdly good... I am still running on the same charge I had about 2 days ago. That's with occasional use of 3g texting and calling. The other thing I am digging is how great my signal is. Like wow. Now the other great thing is the stability.. I have had ZERO force closes in two days. I am just in amazement at this ROM.
Few negatives are the following: In the notification bar the swipe to remove feature is sort of spotty. It works on some notifications then doesn't on others. There's some chinese here and there as you said and there are some typos (which have been reported already. glad I am not beating a dead horse by re-reporting).
I think some things I'd like to see would be the iPhone keyboard and iLauncher built in.
I bought iLauncher a few months ago and it's perfect for this and is 20x better than the previous version I was running.
All in all great ROM. with some updates it'd be amazing to see it progress further. It has potential to become even greater. Thanks for all of your hardwork Torch!!