I spend to day; 4 hours four installing and configuring SharePoint 2013.
I only spend 4 hours, because I did not see a mass of change on SharePoint 2013. On my first BlogPost “Install and configure SharePoint 2013 on Windows 2012” you, as SharePoint administrator can see that the screens are mostly the same. 
Only the prerequisites are different (what’s more normal :-) )

On my new BlogPost I will have about some “layout” differences between SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2010.

When you connect for the first time on Central Administration; you will see a new section “Apps” 

The Monitored Apps page displays the apps for SharePoint that a Farm Administrator monitors. Each app for SharePoint that is listed on this page includes details to help an administrator monitor performance. For example, each app for SharePoint provides the following properties: Name, Status, Source, Licenses in Use, Licenses Purchased, Install Locations, and Runtime Errors. A Farm Administrator chooses to add, remove, and monitor apps for SharePoint.
More Information: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219567(v=office.15)

Secondly when you want to configure a new service application you can see 4 new service applications:

There are some new service applications and some have gone. New with SharePoint 2013 are App Management Service and Machine Translation Services. Both Office Web Appsand Web Analytics Service Applications are gone. Office Web Apps has evolved into a separate server product. Web Analytics is now part of Search.

The SharePoint App Management Service allows you to install SharePoint apps from the Office Marketplace or the App Catalog. It’s responsible for storing and providing information regarding SharePoint App licenses and permissions.
The SharePoint Machine Translation Service allows you to automatically translate content. It provides built-in machine translation capabilities on the SharePoint platform. It can translate documents, pages and sites
The SharePoint Machine Translation Service uses an online service and therefore the server running this Translation Service needs to have a connection with the internet. On port 80 and that may be an issue for some companies.

As third one, you can see the new errors messages, extremely great and again with not more info even you click on Technical Details.

But it's not affraying anymore !!

On the ribbon, the logos has also been changed, I can confirm that these gives a new look, a more serious look to SharePoint Server.

As last point, when a made a new Site Collection I saw that we could use also the templates of SharePoint 2010!

I only can say one thing: BRAVO to the SHAREPOINT team, it’s a new great product.

Happy configuring,

Gokan Ozcifci