I think the component palette needs a little attention. First of all the default height of the palette is too tall. There is a bit of wasted space and it obscures the titles of the other windows (at least in Vista - I think this is a Vista issue because Vista has an extra padding property for composited windows that Lazarus doesn't take into account).
Also the components need to be reorganizable. In other words you must be able to swap components around. For example, the OpenGL control is placed in its own tab which a) wastes tab space and b) there is no reason to be there. I would like to be able to move it somewhere else without recompiling the IDE.
While on this topic, I think the groups are bad. There is no difference between "Common Controls", "Misc" and "Additional" and very little between "Standard" and these three. I think some groups should be merged, but actually the best option would be to get rid of the Delphi grouping alltogether. It bugged me since the Delphi 5 that there is no reason for some groups to exist separately. I think it would be better to make groups by topic instead. Like what Visual C# or NetBeans uses for their designers. Using this way for example, a single component that is about serving HTTP requests could be placed in a "Net" tab instead of its own and the OpenGL control could be placed in a "Graphics" tab, a DataSet on a "Data Sets" tab, etc. Containers such as TPanel, TScrollBox, TForm etc can be placed on a "Containers" tab, buttons (and we have lots of these) can be placed on a "Buttons" tab, etc.
Right now there is a lost of screen space wasted (in my 1680x1050 monitor each tab has more than its half empty with some tabs having only 2-3 controls) and you really need to check all tabs to find some control you're not sure where it is ("Common Controls", "Misc" and "Additional" being usual culprits).
Kostas "Bad Sector" Michalopoulos
PS. Don't tell me "Delphi does it this way" or something similar. I'm using Lazarus not Delphi.