I saw that late last night, and I really like it. It's one of the first interfaces from anything Microsoft related that I actually find aesthetically pleasing.

If I remember right, was the new UI in a beta test for Swiss and Singaporians (Singapore) for quite a while.

I gave the local-tab a try and git strage results as well. why strange ? because I got results for Stuttgart but somehow MSN relocates Stuttgart to munchen,bavaria with my IE and london,london with my Firefox looks like they have cookies with that information cause usually I'm located in munich but right now am in our london office .... but to be fair this is not a .de version so you should test on US cities to get a real impression what local is able to do...

I'm sure what you saw were paid results, but integrated into regular results. 1984 is coming...

I'm not so sure as it says WEBRESULTS and the results have e.g. two listings for one domain would not make sense if it would be paid listings would it?
~baba

Check this out...
http://amanthan.blogspot.com/2006/02/msn-search-and-javascript-issues.html

They are having issues with javascript too...