I recently upgraded my iPhoto to the latest release, motivated mostly by the new "Faces" feature. Here's the short summary so that you can get on with your day: meh.
iPhoto does an OK job of finding any face in a picture, but even after a fair amount of training, it's only so-so at recognizing which specific person belongs to a recognized face. Faces does make it very easy to tag people in pictures -- there are good keyboard commands for rapidly paging through many photos and assigning names to faces.
This easy-editing may be the best use of the Faces feature -- I have made very significant progress in assigning tags of people to pictures in my library. I had tried in the past to do this, but always got very bored quickly.
Once iPhoto learns a face, you can ask it to find other untagged faces that might match. Again, the results are pretty underwhelming -- there are many false positives, and it often fails to find the person in a picture where it should. But even with these problems, the results page once again is a comfortable place to sort through positives and negatives and quickly assign tags.
Given the difficulty of the task, I find it reasonable to understand that iPhoto makes mistakes in recognizing faces. What is puzzling and sometime amusing to me is when it completely fails to find a face at all (often), or when it finds a face when I can't see it:
Maybe iPhoto is trying to tell me something?
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