I’ve just upgraded from 11.0 to 11.1 on my laptop, and it was a mixed experience, but not too bad. Having come from being a Kubuntu user in the past, I’d say it is on a similar level, but with different issues.
I downloaded the dvd and upgraded via that, which took less than an hour. At first, it wouldn’t boot into a GUI at all, until about the third attempt, and if it had failed on the fourth, I would have done a fresh reinstall. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t boot back into KDE, so I had to use ICEWM. The problem was with the NVIDIA driver, and I had to go to some effort to change the repository to get it to work (I had to delete the 11.0 repo and then add in the 11.1 repo). Then I could boot into KDE4.
My first impression is: not bad. Sadly, anyone using something non standard like the xine plugin for Amarok will need to reinstall that. And other things aren’t working as they were prior to upgrading. Dolphin doesn’t have the drives I had set up in the left-hand panel for starters.
As a point release, it should be more like a service pack and should not overwrite preferences like this. And it definitely shouldn’t take such effort to get back into a workable GUI. I’m an opensuse lover, but I’d struggle to convince my friends that it is user friendly enough if you need to go to such efforts any time you want to upgrade.
