I've been using smartphones including HTC phones going back to the XV6700. Over the past few years, I've used the Pre, the original EVO, the epic 4g touch, galaxy nexus, and now the one. This is by far the most beautiful piece of hardware I have ever used. I feel like we finally have an android phone that puts the same amount of love in design that Apple has focused on for years. The core things I care about - call quality, battery life, responsiveness, and camera, all work very well. It's not perfect, but it's the closest in terms of overall design I've seen yet, and simply crushes the galaxy in terms of hardware feel.
As far as software, I've also thrown CM on just about everything listed above, trying to get as close to a stock experience as I could. I thought I'd hate sense. On the EVO it was just too much in the way, and frustrated the hell out of me with basic android apps (like the calendar) being forever replaced. A lot of that has been fixed by Google decoupling a lot of their core apps, so you can download them on the play store. But more importantly, this version of sense is very close to what I care about in stock. It is a clean interface that adds some design but doesn't replace the things that work well. The lock screen for example, is well thought out, and the ability to jump to any app on your launcher or directly into any notification is nice. The overall appearance is clean, and I think they went in the right direction moving away from the iconic flip-clock weather look, in favor of the more flattened graphics. The launcher is also perfectly usable, although I would like to be able to modify the grid on the homescreens a little more. Generally speaking, sense stays out of my way, and for the first time in many phones, I'm not salivating to throw a custom rom on it.
I would like quick toggles, and I think blinkfeed would be more useful if there was more granular control over the feeds (the highlights feed edits what it shows me from my facebook and twitter timelines - I would like to be able to tell it to just show me all of those feeds), but these are small improvements, and I think they highlight how much I actually like what HTC did here.
I really hope HTC keeps putting out gorgeous phones like this to differentiate itself in the market.