Finally did it for real today. Had my intro flight in an '95 piper warrior. Just enough time to get a feel for the controls, practiced staying level and turned a couple times.
Some dweeb in a cessna tried to ram us but the instructor put us in a hasty dive (i think we dove somewhere between 400-600 feet from something like 2.2k to 1.6k ft) and got away. The radio to the tower went something like:
tower: how close were you to him?
instructor: very, very close but we got our pants changed and are ready for landing.
He said that was as close as he's ever been to another plane.. I wasn't nearly as scared as I probably should have been, but I did resist the urge to pull back up on his 6 and shoot him down.

Interestingly the feel of the controls and view outside was pretty disorienting/unfamilar but i was perfectly comfortable when looking down at the insturments

-sequence