Well, after being throughly put off, I dived into systemd and have done a complete (pure) systemd installation; and I can tell you, I think its pretty nice.
I had no plans to change Arch’s initialization system, but I needed to switch to systemd because parts of GNOME 3 require it. Its been a long time a coming but systemd is a good thing for Linux, a real good thing. Arch’s init system was legendary. It’s what I believed what attracted a lot of people about Arch. Being so pulled to for me was it’s basic, straight-forward setup, so I wasn’t exactly excited about having to switch to systemd. systemd setup isn’t quite as easy as Arch’s rc system but I like it and found it has good logic. The best thing about systemd though will be its unification between other distros. This means that setting up a good number of programs will be similar no matter what distribution documentation is read. Also systemd will save a good amount of developers time as many of the distribution-based init scripts will no longer have to be specifically written (and will rather be included in the application). Plus it inclusion of D-BUS makes it a good deal more powerful.
Here’s what it looks like. It’s not quite as nice looking as Arch’s, but oh well:
systemd is the future… yeeeaaahh! A more unified Linux front.
A basic detail of my systemd install can be found on my GNOME 3 Setup page. Even better to read the whole page on the wiki which is really well done.
I did this last month due to some Udev rules that suggested Systemd. Had a blast doing it and could not have pulled it off without #systemd on IRC. Congrats!