>Viv,
>
>We're also a short stint into development of a new system in Winforms, do you see WPF as ready for the real world?

I guess it depends. For the purposes of the application we're working on (lot of graphics) it so far seems a good fit.

>
>Will it work on any XP and up computer (even if bad hardware or will it just not work)?

AFAIK it requires XP(SP2) OS and up but is apparently optimized for Vista.
Supposedly uses hardware acceleration if the graphics card supports it but seems to work fine without. We're using average spec W2K3 and XP machines for development ( just one designer on Vista).

>Also, is data access and connection to SQL the same, does it use ADO.NET?
Same data access classes - but different binding mechanisms for the UI

>In your research did you notice any feature/capability loss in WPF that exists in Winforms?

The range of available WPF controls is not as extensive as for WinForms (see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms750559.aspx for details).

HTH,
Viv