Heyyo,
Yeah, steam was horrible, but now it's bearable. I do like how steam does put it all in the gcf file, cause it's like a big backup you never need to worry aboot. So let's say you download a custom gun model for the mp5, you hate it, just delete it and there you go, steam just loads the default mp5 model.
The friends system would be nice... if it worked properly. When you log into steam, it doesn't log you into friends at the same time.. why? who knows, but what I know that is if you're logged into that friends thing, it auto logs you out after a bit cause there's not enough servers to keep it running on all steam accounts. So I don't even bother with it, I just use xfire.
It also feels like the games are more laggy, especially for older machines. You see, that steam program can sometimes take a lot of memory to use. Usually dormant it's like 1KB, but when active it can leap up to more than your explorer at 19KB, which's annoying, but shouldn't be a problem with newer computers like mine, but I can get pickey cause my cpu is only a AMD Athlon XP 1900+
So yes, there's pro's and cons to steam, and some of the games. (CS 1.6 is really weird, it's like they rewrote the handling for all the guns, makes it impossible for us CS 1.5 and down users to get the hang of CS 1.6 right away... in fact, I'm still trying to cope
).