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When I first saw ICS being previewed late last year, my first reaction was "This looks nothing like Gingerbread or Froyo." ICS was a major design overhaul of the UI, Jellybean is what I would call an overhaul of the underpinnings of the OS. Where there are slight changes to the UI, making it simpler and easier to use, a lot of the work has been don under the hood.

The first (and probably biggest) change in JB is speed and UI/touch performance. ICS, although a major change in the UI, didn't really do Android any favors in performance. Running 4.01/4.02 on my Galaxy Nexus, ICS seemed laggy at times, despite the impressive specs of the photo. However, with JB, the UI is much snappier. Project Butter had done wonders for performance.

Touch performance is much improved, as are the animations in the OS. Everything feels snappy.

The other major feature in JB is Google Now, Google sudo-Siri competitor.

Although I haven't had a lot of time with Google Now, overall I like the concept. The use of "Cards" is a nice touch, however as of right now, the use is somewhat limited. I wish that their where more of them. I hope Google Increases the number in the future, or better yet, releases an API for developers to develop their own.

Other great Improvements in JB that I love:

• High Resolution Contact Photos - This was a huge annoyance for me in ICS. The People App within ICS had spaces for these great High-Res photos of contacts. However, if you had contact photos in Gmail, even if they where High-Res, the people App Would only pull down a small 256x256 thumbnail. These caused pictures to be grainy and stretched out. The solution? Create a Picasa Web Album, import high-resolution photos of all my contacts and manually add them to each and every contact. Fortunately, I only had about 90 contacts, so it didn't take that long. Still it was annoying. Now in JB, it will import the full, right resolution photo into the People App or G+. Awesome.
• Automatic Re-Arranging Icons on the Home Screen - Awesome- No more having to manually move Widgets and shortcuts manually.
• Share & Default Application Menu's - Are much improved. Much easier to navigate.
• Reception - When I was running 4.01/4.02 originally on my Galaxy Nexus, I had major issues with reception and the phone disconnecting from the network. The phone would go down to 0.5/1 bars making me have to reboot the device, and this would happen at least once a day. With JB, reception is much improved, as is data performance.
• Notifications - Have been tweaked and improved. Although I haven't seen a lot of the Third Party Apps taking advantage of it yet, a lot of Google Apps (Gmail,Maps/Navigation and Calendar) take advantage of it right out of the box. I also love that more of the notifications can be be dismissed so they don't take up space in the Menu Bar.

Conclusion
Overall, I love JB. I think it's a great improvement on ICS, in terms of performance and features. Having used other Android Skins in the past (HTC Sense), I think stock Android is still the best experience out there for Android and I'll stick with and continue to buy Google Nexus phones as long as Google keeps making them.