As an exercise to teach myself how to build debian packages, I set up a 32-bit siduction Razor-Qt VM and used it to build the new 1.7.5 e17 packages, and installed them with dpkg. In a couple hours of playing with it/getting used to it, everything seems to work as intended. I thought I found a bug with the screen resolution setting, but it's just very "touchy". With a little patience I got it set to 1366x768, which looks fine on my 1920x1200 monitor. This may be an issue with my VMware video setup and might not be a problem on real hardware.
From this experience with the "plain vanilla" E17, I would say it is usable out of the box, but the defaults are nowhere near as flashy as Bodhi. The first login takes you through a couple of preference screens (lappy or desktop?), scaling, and localization screens, and then it's ready to go. There are 26 themes included.