{tech}.Ben Buckman.net

I decided to take the plunge and root my Motorola Droid. (I'm tired of waiting for Motorola to release the official 2.1 update.) I followed the instructions here, using DMUpdater. I backed up first with MyBackup (30 day trial) and manually backed up the SD Card. The DMUpdater instructions worked perfectly, rooting and then flashing the new ROM. The latter step wiped the desktop icons (and I'm not sure what else) - I figured that would happen but it'll take some time to get it all back.
Wifi tethering works great, getting 2.5 Mbps (and I can delete PDANet now).
The backlight (on keyboard and buttons) didn't work initially, but turning Automatic Brightness off and back on seems to have fixed it.
I'm not sure yet what else is new with the update, I'll write more as I find out.

Update: The brightness issue returned, but was fixed again with the "Bright Control" app added by DMUpdater.

Update: The official 2.1 release is delayed again.

Also: The update seems to have disabled auto-sync (turned back on in the settings). And apps in the Market that should work on the Droid, like the new Dropbox app, don't appear, so I wonder if the ROM/OS version is messing that up.