I made the move for customer service reasons and couldn't be happier in that regard.
Now some people on D*, from what I can tell, really seem to like the equipment, but I liked Dish's better. The 722 that I had was great. I loved the MENU-All channels, MENU-All sub, MENU- All HD thing. It made finding HD channels easy. There is a way to build custom lists like you can on the Dish stuff, but you have to navigate a menu tree several button pushes to get there.
As for the HD, Its the same as or better than Dish, depending on what you like. Dish has more HD movie channels, while there are more HD sports on D*. Most of the time my signal is better and locked tighter on D* than it was with Dish.
My biggest complaint after using the dish equipment is the lack of easy organization of the channels. They are kind of scattered all over the place on D*, and don't seem to have any sense of order. (To me anyway... EX: discovery and History and Science channels are all over the map, those should be grouped together.)
Hope this helps.
If you have any more specific questions feel free to ask me. I was with dish for 2 years before moving over here.
Schaaf.