Well for anyone having problems connecting to other persons, I changed the steam server before I booted AE and that took care of it, I'm in the Caribbean, but I checked a US server closer to me which was Florida, I played many matches with persons all over the world.
Impressions:
a

There seems to be less input lag in this version over that of gfwl, my moves just comes out crisply, sometimes under gfwl, I could have sworn I was playing in molasses even when there wasn't any substantial internet lag.
b

Some connections will still be laggy, at worse you will get many interruptions (waiting for the player), it takes you out of it a bit, so hopefully they improve things there. I've also noticed slowdown whilst playing arcade mode waiting for ranked matches, the same used to happen to me under gfwl.
c

Everybody has a mic on Steam it seems, so I can hear the opponents beating on their sticks very loudly or in other cases, persons talking trash and spewing vulgarities mid match. (A guy was so pissed off, that he was talking trash mid match, said I could not play sf, he got bodied first round and I was just about to perfect him the second round, he ragequitted just before the K.O)
Thing is, I can't message that guy and say (gg, lol) or anything, it's a very vital part of competitive fighting games online. As it is, you're just not connected to the persons you play online, there's no list of persons you just played or an easy way to connect to them. Say what you want of gfwl, but that is such a great feature.
Overall, when the connection was solid, it felt better due to less input lag in my opinion, maybe it's due to the absence of the gfwl overlay and it's resident features. The benchmark also seems to run at a higher clip as opposed to gfwl as well, hopefully they sort out the kinks, but it's certainly not as bad as I thought it was on first use.