Yes, it’s a night n’ day difference. Although, it’s easy to become reliant on various ‘aftermarket’ mods to ones workspace. I also recommend rising above the super duper nature of these amazing devices and exercise your mind to imagine the 3D even without the use of your computer screen. It’s good to exercise the mind and imagine what the 3D can do without all the technology assisting the mind to see.
But having direct connection with 6 degrees of freedom to fluently navigate 3D space, I mean what else does that?
How many extra clicks and stutters will manifest daily from the regular use of a regular mouse just to navigate 3D? click click click stutter stutter click stutter lol thousands of times a day 
Way back in the day when I was in college and exploring all that the 3D modeling industry had to offer, one of the first investments I made immediately was in a $500 spaceball 5000! Plus the addition of CATIA student license. I would literally sit in my home office for countless hours just using the 3D navigator device just mesmerized while navigating around the 3D space of my projects. 
A few times I’d had roommates that would sit at my computer and had lots of fun using the 3D navigator. They wouldn’t stop though so I’d have to yell at them and kick them off 
There’s definitely something to this. However, I think I usually resolve my issues in this regard, by rebooting the program or even rebooting my computer completely. Anytime I’ve seen this ‘jumpy’ behavior, I don’t recall it being a persistant problem. I really think rebooting helps.
But R8 definitely has lots of bugs. I tried dong some basic printing of layouts today, and it was just an absolute failure. I almost went back to using R7.