Elements isn't, as assumed, merely a neutered version of Photoshop, punted out to the less geeky pixel pushers out there.  It's more a consumer-friendly reworking of the pro application.
The first and most obvious change in moving from PS to PSE6 is the interface, which has gone from a pro palette-oriented 50% grey to a darker, gunmetal, piped and highlighted with splashes of bold colour. The effect is quite pleasing on the eye and the darker grey helps focus the eye on the image.  The splash of wildly contrasting orange piping at the top of the edit screen is a bit of a distraction though, no matter how cool it looks.
On first start-up, after registration, you are presented with a helper screen where you can choose to organise your photo collections, edit individual images, create collages and effects or share your images by e-mail or by publishing them on the world wide web – a first time user can create impressive looking Flash galleries without knowing a single bit of code.  The Welcome screen can be called up at any time, although, as a PS user it's little alarming when it  suddenly opens a new instance of the program when you click a new button.
Clicking on Organise for the first time you are asked to select your image directory or directories.  PSE6 then reads all of the image files in this directory and subdirectories – even automatically fixing red-eye on images as it goes if you let it. Where images have keywords they are imported right along with the images and, of course, you can add your own, tagging your images so that you can later perform Flickr-like tags filtering.  This filtering is also incorporated into the creation of Smart Albums – where the tags you assign can automatically populate the corresponding virtual photo album.