for now just turning on 'Legacy BIOS' will still work to install the old way.. but yeah you need to zero the drive on HP's at least.. to force the hardware to ignore the old partition structure. that's new. on dells and 1 lenova i've tried it on.. the 'quick' format was enough to install Windows 7. Linux would've been easier, but who uses *that* OS? 
as for UEFI itself.. it will be an improvement over BIOS once most hardware has >1TB hard drives, since BIOS *can't boot to a 2TB drive* (!!!) eventually BIOS will have to go the way of RS-232 serial ports..
linux of course, can easily boot from EFI/UEFI. it's what Macs have been using all along.. the dual-booting MacBook i'm writing this post on uses rEFIt chain-loader to boot into either Mac's EFI bootloader, or SysLinux (i could've used the GRUB and have in the past).
IOW, Linux is already UEFI ready. in fact.. here's how-to boot into Arch Linux (my preference) using a machine's built-in firmware UEFI loader..
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/UEFI_Bootloaders#Using_UEFI_Shell
..YOU CAN'T DO THAT WITH WINDOWS 7.
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