IEBlog has an entry about how they are working very diligently on improving the CSS and standards support in IE7 even though IE7 Beta 1 offers nearly nothing for improvements.
I wanted to make it clear that we know Beta 1 makes little progress for web developers in improving our standards support, particularly in our CSS implementation. I feel badly about this, but we have been focused on how to get the most done overall for IE7, so due to our lead time for locking down beta releases and ramping up our team, we could not get a whole lot done in the platform in beta 1. However, I know this will be better in Beta 2 – and I want to share how we are placing our priorities in IE.
They list some fixes that have already been implemented since IE7 Beta 1 and it honestly looks very promising.