I've spent a couple weeks with the phone and I am very pleased.

I know there is a lot of hubbub about the screen and she other issues. Either I dodged all those bullets, or the issues are being exaggerated (likely a combination).

I have thoroughly inspected the screen (including under microscopes) in various conditions and can find no flaws. Even the faint graininess I mentioned before seems no better or worse than any other phone. Compared directly (and under equal scrutiny) to an S8, S8+, and Axon 7 (all Samsung AMOLEDs), I think this screen holds up great. Colors are truer and blacks are DEEP. Battery life is superb at far higher brightness than I usually am accustomed to as well. No, colors are NOT as "saturated" as Samsung phones, and I honestly prefer it this way. One of my favorite things about the Axon 7 was its dual-criteria screen tuning options, and I always had that tuned to the truest mode, not the oversaturated default Samsung-tuned mode. The Pixel 2 offers similarly accurate color reproduction with deeper blacks.
Moreover, the screen stands up will on its own. Media looks great and it handles contrast better than any screen I've seen. Movies, photos, books, webpages... All look great on this screen.
Interestingly, despite being a Pentile display, I struggle to see the Pentile pattern on the Pixel 2. My Axon has the exact same DPI and also has a Pentile OLED, and I can easily discern the pattern when reading very small, high-contrast text (something I do a lot of). The Pixel's display disguises it more. After some time with a microscope on both, I think the LG pOLED in the Pixel 2 has smaller dot pitch (distance between individual pixels) and even subpixel pitch (distance between individual R/G/B pixel elements) than the AMOLEDs I'm used to looking at. It looks VERY sharp, and the excellent contrast enhances that look. It's honestly just easy on the eyes.

Physically, I like the phone a lot. It feels big but not huge.
General ergonomics are good. Button placement is great, though I wish they had textured the power button as they did with the Nexus 6 for quick tactile discernment. Fingerprint scanner is FAST and works with dirtier, oilier, greasier, and wetter fingers than others I've tried to date, which is nice when you just need to google something quickly with engine grime-covered hands.
I think the "hybrid coating" over the aluminum body feels nice. It has similar thermal properties to metal, so it feels cold to the touch and warms in the hand, but it's grippier while still being smooth. Sort of satiny. It looks nice. We'll see how it ages and wears.

The software is why I bought this phone. Android with Google's machine learning and software. Every system app is well-honed, easy to use, and easy on the eyes, unlike Android phones from other manufacturers. Everything integrates well, talks to each-other, and syncs with my other devices. Even if you don't actively utilize Google Assistant's search and command functionality, you still benefit from its data-processing abilities, which are frankly orders of magnitude better than Siri, Cortana, Bixby, or Alexa. Where the others are more like butlers or maids -- you ask for something and they either do it or tell you the answer or where to find the answer -- Assistant is a secretary. Siri and the like are designed to be on hand to quickly respond to requests when you make them. Assistant follow a far more useful and real-world-applicable design ethos: Present you with the information you need WITHOUT having to ask for it. It's organizational where the others are merely search boxes with a voice command option. It has gotten very good at its job, too. In the early Google Now days, it was good for telling you the weather and maybe giving you some traffic advice. Now, it collects all your data, looks at how it relates, and tells you want you need to know to make it all work as part of your whole day, not just a single event or fact amongst the rest.
And the Pixel 2 puts that info front-and-center. Always-on-display lets you know when there's useful info when your phone is just sitting on the desk. The homescreen is topped with a dynamic info display that normally just shows the date and weather, but expands to show upcoming appointments. Notifications will appear with subtle tuning so that they make you aware of useful info without demanding your attention RIGHT NOW. That's probably one of the neatest things about the Android 8.0/Pixel/Assistant combo: notifications have gone from being nagging annoyances to being useful information. I am always well-informed but never assaulted by data. It's marvelous, and exactly the goal we should be going for with our everpresent digital devices.
Alexa can stick to ordering batteries when I run out and Siri can stick to defining words when I don't want to type. Assistant is helping me actually look like I'm an organized human being. THAT is what I have been looking for in a digital assistant since the days when they were actually CALLED Personal Digital Assistants.
Assistant still has lots of room to make progress, but the fact that it sort of works in the background is wonderful.

The camera is indeed great. It handles low-light shots far better than any phone camera I've seen except the S8 (which does INCREDIBLE things with high-contrast shots combining dark shadow and bright light). HDR is nice and helps reduce the tradeoff of graininess in high-contrast or low-light pictures where one ISO setting doesn't work across the whole frame. I'm still not sure what the point of the motion photos is, but I understand it when Apple did it, either, so I'm clearly just not in that target audience.
Stabilization on video is STAGGERINGLY GOOD. It's really every bit as good as the scooter video demo Google shows it off with. It looks like the camera was on a steadycam mount or tripod every time. Of course, it doesn't work fully on 4K (EIS needs to crop to stabilize), which would normally be met with replies of "who has storage for 4K videos on their phone?!". But since Google is giving Pixel 2 owners 3 years of full-quality image and video uploads, and since this phone comes with up to 128GB of storage, it's actually kind of disappointing that I can't shoot steadycam-stable 4K video on my phone. But the 1080 stuff looks great, and 60Hz honestly often makes far more of a visual difference to the human eye than 4K vs 1080 anyway, especially when there's lots of action in-frame.
I tested the bokeh selfie feature just to check out the cropping and dithering. It works well, but it's probably the only selfie I'll ever take so, like the motion photos, I'm clearly just not the userGoogle had in mind when they built that feature.

Battery life is also genuinely impressive. I can go from 7:00 in the morning until midnight without even THINKING about a charger, and that'll usually leave me with about 20% battery remaining. And remember this is a new phone, so I've been fiddling and tweaking and using it even more than average. I will EASILY get 6+ hours of SCREEN ON time out of this phone. No stressing when watching movies on the go. I honestly never even think about chargers until I plug the phone in at night when I go to sleep. I have been watching lots of videos because that's why you buy a 6'' screen with stereo speakers, and the battery just keeps up. I also use the phone as my instrument cluster (via Torque) which means at least 1.5 hours of screen on time a day. Doesn't even make a dent. I play music via bluetooth from my phone all day. Doesn't even budge the battery. But this isn't some ultra-battery-saving mode where wireless is disabled and all background tasks are paused. It's normal phone performance in normal use lasting actually ALL day. If I used the phone a little less for video, I am 100% sure I could go 48 hours without a charge.

Some other notes:
The phone uses USB Power Deliver 2.0 rather than Qualcomm QuickCharge (which is currently in its 4th generation). All Snapdragon 835-equipped phones have hardware support for QC4.0, but Google and Samsung are moving toward USB PD2, which has a couple of big benefits:
1: It works with ANY high-wattage charger, not just expensive ones with the right control chip for your phone's quick charge standard. This is awesome.
2: It works with existing LAPTOP USB type C chargers and docks. And since Mac and most modern Windows laptops are moving to USB C for charging as well as connecting USB devices, there are gajillions of USB type C chargers and charge-through docks (meaning you get more USB ports, ethernet, whatever else right through the same port you charge with).
3: Qualcomm's QC standard actually breaks some of the USB 3 standard, and leaves you with lower data throughput. With USB PD 2, you get full USB 3.1 speeds (assuming your device is a 3.1 device, like the Pixel 2) but also get fast charging.
Unlike QC 2.0 and earlier, QC 3.0 and later and USB PD 2 are much easier on batteries. Rather than flooding the battery with amps to force it to charge quickly, the newer standards all vary voltage and amperage intelligently to keep the battery cool and avoid stressing cell chemistry while still charging fast. And fast it is. I plugged my phone in last night with 15% battery while watching a 30 minute youtube video. By the end, I was over 90%. And that was using a generic high-wattage charger and not the packed-in Pixel one.
This is the first phone I've EVER owned where I just don't stress about charging or battery life.

It has Bluetooth 5.0 and supports Sony's LDAC codec, which offers audio quality over Bluetooth that's better than what most people get over their wired setups (unless you have an audiophile-grade hifi setup). It sounds phenomenal with an LDAC-compatible device (like my MDR-1000X sony headphones). But LDAC isn't the only HQ BT codec included, and the phone claims to select the best codec for your device, so basically, no matter what you're using, you're going to get better audio through it than you would through all but the best wired headphones.

But: you may not need headphones, because the front-facing speakers are outstanding for their size. You get quite a surprising amount of dynamic range out of them, meaning you can actually ENJOY a movie using just the phone itself thanks to that screen and those speakers. I compared it side-by-side with a Nexus 6 and Axon 7. The A7 and Pixel 2 blow the Nexus 6 away, and are very comparable. The Axon 7 and Pixel 2 have slightly different audio characteristics through the speakers, but I honestly can't tell if one is better. They're just different. Both get loud without distortion, both have decent dynamic range for tiny speakers, and neither is raspy or poppy or tinny.

For years, I complained that the smartphone market had plateaued and everyone was building the same phone. These days, some argue that that's truer than ever. But I think that this year's crop of flagships are a sign of something really neat: a shift from a hardware arms race to a software arms race. Just like PC tech eventually reached a point where you can do pretty much anything but intensive gaming on pretty much ANY machine, I think phones have reached the point where the tech inside your phone is only there to make it work. What makes the real difference now is software. And where software is concerned, there are really only a couple of players right now, and everyone else is going to get left behind regardless of hardware specs if they don't start focusing on the degree of software integration and polish that Google and Apple and possibly soon Samsung have to offer. This is the beginning of the era of the SMART smartphone.

Cool stuff, very in depth. You take your reviews seriously!

Thanks for the review!

One question that I think I know the answer too (and it ain't what I want it to be ) ... does the Pixel 2 XL allow for wireless charging? My Nexus 6 does and I really like that a lot - two stands (one at home and one at my desk) and it makes it so much easier to use.

Z

No wireless charging on the Pixel 2 or XL. They are both metal-chassis phones, so there's nowhere for an inductive coil to work.

I definitely found the wireless charging option for my Nexus 5 convenient (especially with the magnetically self-aligning LG charger made for the N5). But with the Nexus 6 and support for faster wired charging, I kind of stopped using wireless chargers. Wireless chargers push maybe half an amp at best, where you can get 2-3 amps through a cable. And with battery life being so much better on modern phones (I NEVER plug by Pixel 2 in except when I'm sleeping at night), in addition to USB C's sturdier reversible connector, I don't miss it as a convenience feature.

But, if it's a must-have for you, you'll want to look at plastic- or glass-backed phones like the S8 or LG V30 (the latter being very very closely related hardware-wise to the Pixel 2 XL).

Thanks!

I suspect that I will give up on the wireless charging then ... I'd rather have a better phone. Yeah, the wireless chargers are slower than wired, but work just fine for me with overnight stands. Oh, well.

Z