Maven will never tell you which phases or goals are available in the pom, you have to guess or check the on-line documentation
Maven by default uses text files to dump the test execution results, if you want to see what's happening on the console you have to call it with -Dsurefire.useFile=false
Maven can skip the executions of the tests (sometimes might be useful!) call it with -Dmaven.test.skip=true
Maven knows what inheritance is (and therefore claims that it's object oriented... grrr...) so if you can't find where some property is defined have a look up on the parent
Maven is based on XML but you won't write as much XML as with Ant
Maven downloads stuff from the internet (#1 failure reason for 99% Maven presentations) but can be run in offline mode (if you had a sucessfull install previously), try mvn -o
Maven uses repositories, but since not all the libs in the world are in repositories you should setup a local repository (Archiva works well)
Maven uses repositories, but since you don't want to hog all your company bandwith you should setup a local repository
