Harmy said:
.. it seemed incredibly complicated to me, so many buttons and windows and not enough space for anything on my laptop's 15.4" monitor ;-D
The only windows that come up by default are a timeline, a preview window, an audio slider, and a file browser. You can change the file browser to any of a number of other things (for instance, if you want to browse backgrounds instead). It all fits on my 15" screen, but I do have to resize things to keep the preview window reasonably large while still viewing multiple tracks on the timeline. I make the timeline tracks as small as they'll go, and the preview window as large as I can. You're right there are little buttons all over the place, but most of them can be ignored as they are shortcuts to functions that are on the right-click menus. You only need to use a few of them at the start, like the mute and solo buttons, and the play, stop, and pause buttons.
You can generally start right out by browsing for the files you want, stacking them in rows on the timeline, and pressing play. Where Vegas excels is in manipulating the clips on the timeline... stretching, cutting, moving them around, and crossfading them is, I found, intuitive. And pretty much everything can be previewed in real time without rendering or pre-rendering, so you can try stuff out immediately as you move things around. Even Avid requires pre-rendering a lot of things that Vegas can just preview instantly.
I started out with iMovie and was impressed with its ease of use. However, as my needs became more intricate, I found myself finding it hard to get it to do the things I needed to do. The first time I fired up Vegas, I never opened iMovie again. I've also used Premiere, MovieMaker, and Avid, and find Vegas by far the easiest to use. Of course, this is my personal opinion and other people may have their own style of working/thinking.