Realize this is getting to be an old thread but just wanted to put a word in for this lens. I recently got one, and it is a night and day improvement on the old 70-300 AFS ED VR in terms of optics; there's no purple fringing whatsoever (a huge problem on the old one beyond 200), flatness of field and general performance are excellent across the range and side-to-side, and it appears to outresolve the D800 sensor. There's tremendous overhead on the VR -- more than four stops at the 300mm end and solidly 2.5 at the 70 end at least in my hands (except that it does what other recent VR lenses do on the D800 and loses it a bit between about 1/80th and 1/160th on the longer zoom settings) -- and the autofocus seems even faster than the already sprightly old version was. At $600 plus sales tax in the US, it should probably be among the first telephoto lenses that any FX user looks at.
The only even minor flaw is Nikon's continued failure to produce a film camera that supports fully electronic mounts; this isn't the end of the world on the long telephoto E lenses because they'll still work with AF or MF and at maximum aperture where you're mostly using them anyway (you just can't stop them down on, say, an F5, F6 or F100), but with these AF-P lenses, it's not possible to focus them manually or automatically on a camera that doesn't 100 percent support electronic connections and even the F6 is too old for that.
