sand,
My wife drives an 03 745i and while the vehicle is very nice, I can't say much about the elecronics nor electricals. Took delivery in 10/03 and noticed the steering wheel was vibrating at speed, dealer balanced tires, swapped, and it still vibrated. It turned out to be a bad batch of component in the pinion gear area and BMW NA claimed they didn't know which vehicle suffered from this batch (I call it B/S as they must know this).
The i-drive is probably one of those good ideas that went south, and I believe the implementation is the worst in its class (even BMW has updated the interface in the new 6 & 5 series), by comparison, the Audi's version is much more intuitive. If you are comfortable with the i-drive, then it shouldn't bother you too much, but in my wife's case, she relies on the voice command instead. The 7 series has gone through more software patches than Win XP and the latest fiasco we encountered was a melted side bolster on the driver's seat due to poorly designed heating element, why only the driver's seat is beyond me, but this last "smoking" seat happened in a span of 5 seconds from the time she engaged the heated seat and took 13 working days to resolve.
The included phone (Moto V60) is an EOL product, and up to now they still haven't provided a bluetooth solution to be retrofitted, they think they have a workaround, but it cannot coexist with the on-board navigation.
I was looking at the 6 series right about the time I bought the H2 2 months ago but decided to pass on it. May be it was fate, but an associate of mine just took delivery of the 6 and we were having lunch, he got a call from BMW telling him not to operate the vehicle & they would come & fetch it. It turned out that one of the modules had some faulty codes which could render the vehicle inoperable without warning - loss of all power. So they do know which module went with which vehicle after all....
Don't get me wrong as I love to drive my wife's 7 (though I find the steering overly boost and not providing enough feedback), the mechanical/electronic stablization is simply amazing, I could turn on a dime without experiencing much sway/roll. OTOH, if we were to do it over again, the 7 won't be on our short list, not unless they ditch the i-drive and give me some old-fashioned knobs & buttons.
You may want to hop over to
http://www.bimmerfest.com/ & see what the general experience has been, that's a fairly decent forum and one of the reps from BMW participates on as well.
Good luck...