Suddenly I feel good about my NOTE. I was sure the S3 was going to blow it out of the water, but all it did was to match it.

I mean the new Exynos and the NOTE's SoC aren't too far apart,especially when you have Android bogging things down.
The screens the same, actually NOTE's better because of extra pixels and more screen estate.
I see they've changed the design (like that of Nokia 701) but personally it looks ugly...the straight narrow bezels of NOTE have a Bold and Handsome stance that I've come to like
The S3 has a beefy 2,100mAh battery which is still smaller than the NOTE's 2,500mAh battery (and I think there were some aftermarket 3,000mAh available too).
The S3 doesn't have much/any new features that are missing from the NOTE, except for maybe NFC which is pointless at the moment, the camera's are the same.

All it looks like is that Samsung brought the S3 upto terms but not blowing away the competition like they did with the S and SII. I guess they've concentrated on the software more this round (battery management/drivers/ui/etc), which is a good thing since it can get recycled in custom roms for the S2 or NOTE.

I hope the NOTE2 isn't going to be a lackluster upgrade, hopefully it will herald the jump back to dual core (or maybe tricore) architecture with Eagle/bigLITTLE implementation. Maybe even 2GB ram for those Ubuntu ports