I have only used it in VR but my experience so far:
- it has some lag, but not too bad
- the tracking will be lost and confused when you grab any of your "appendages"
- the sensor FOV is not great, but that would probably not be such an issue outside of VR because the sensor positioning is different. In VR, tracking is lost unless your hands constantly stay within your own field of view
- when tracking is lost and then regained, your hands sometimes fly through the room, so there is a chance you smack around anything within reach (which can seriously break poses and animations that need alignment)
- you can't do much interaction except touching and grabbing, and grabbing sometimes misfires (but not too often). Annoying in VR, because you sometimes need to switch to controllers, but again probably a non-issue in desktop mode
I used the sensor a few times in the beginning and thought it was quite exciting to use, but basically stopped using it pretty soon-ish. But that's mainly because it's somewhat cumbersome to use in VR and I got tired of having to reload / reset scenes after accidently whacking characters out of their poses once too often. Haven't really tried the newer SDK that came out as a preview recently. The hand tracking seemed way better, but the initial hand recognition was slower. Although I think this was a few months back, so things might have improved since then.
The newer IR 170 sensor is way better, but also pretty expensive compared to the Leap Motion one.
Honestly, if 70 bucks isn't a big deal for you, I'd give it a try. IMHO it's not that great compared to VR controllers (especially if they have finger tracking), but compared to a mouse .... ^ ^