If Microsoft has one message they want people to take away from the annual Consumer Electronics Show, it?? ??e??e listening.?While the software giant didn’t reveal any major surprises during the opening keynote last night with CEO Steve Ballmer, the company’s announcement that Windows 7 would be released to 2.5 million or so beta users beginning tomorrow has been billed as a watershed moment for the company.

After its disastrous Windows Vista operating system was panned near-universally, the company has spent many months and hours talking to businesses and consumers about what they’d like in the new operating system. There certainly are a lot of nifty new features, including the ability to perform touch-based tasks. And the new OS will be a kindler, gentler force to your PC, taking up less resources after Microsoft engineers jettisoned legacy code and rebuilt the OS as a much cleaner piece of software.

Now it will spend several months getting feedback for Windows 7 from the beta users. What does it all mean? PC users will finally get an OS that works quite well late this year. Meantime, Apple is likely to continue to sign up a bunch of new converts to the Mac platform. The real comparisons will come when Apple announces new additionals for its update in coming months.