I have been quite critical regarding the state IL2:CoD was released in, but the last two patches have improved the sim considerably for me so it's only fair to comment on the positive sides of the sim.
There are still quite a few areas where I'm not really happy with the game, but it's obvious that we're slowly getting there.
A good example:
I'm currently working on a mission, a massive Luftwaffe attack on Ford AF. In the current version there are 72 He-111, escorted by 24 Bf-109s, attacked by 16 Hurricans and 16 Spitfires.
On my system (core i5 @4Ghz, GTX 470, 8 Gig RAM, Win7 64 bit) the mission is well playable with decent performance (mid 30-ish) with some slowdowns when a bombers explodes etc...
A couple of pics:
And a small vid, excuse my crappy video-making skillz...