I have no way of trying one out. I have that almost all of the places around here that sell firearms do NOT have an indoor range for their customers to try it out to if it's a fit for them. I'm probably just going to go with my gut feeling and buy it. I did that on my four wheeler and I LOVE my YFZ 450R
Let me preface by saying that this is just my $0.02 ;-) ... and I come from a Glock background, so take that for what it is worth.
I have owned two M&P9s - the full-size and the compact - and while I found the M&Ps to be nice pistols there were, IMO, some serious caveats.
First, out of the box the triggers on both pistols were very rough. This is a general issue with the platform and although the problem does go away after putting a lot of rounds through them, I opted to install the Apex Duty/Carry Enhancement Kit on both guns. That resulted in a *very* smooth pull... but the install was a bit of a challenge and the parts added to the overall cost significantly.
After a lot of shooting I grew to dislike the M&P's hinged trigger design. This resulted in what felt like an _extremely_ long pretravel. I found myself on occasion thinking I had had a misfire when in fact I'd just not pulled the trigger far enough. Of course, this speaks more to the ergonomics of the pistols in my hand than anything else but I found it to be a a real nuisance. The reset on the M&Ps (if you have trained to shoot to reset) is really "vague", to put it nicely...
Another thing I found curious: the M&Ps definitely felt comfortable in my hand but I did not see that translate to any measurable shooting performance gains. In fact I found that the grips had a tendency to move around more in my hands than I was used to and this led to fidgeting with my grip. Stippling the grips would surely have helped but I never got around to doing that.
You should also know that there have been recent reports of dead triggers on the M&P under certain circumstances which apparently renders the gun inoperable and requires shipping the gun back to S&W for service. S&W has pretty good customer support, though, from my experiences.
My verdict? In the end I lost confidence in my M&Ps as defensive weapons. A range gun can be a bit fiddly and it is not really a problem but a defensive weapon needs to absolutely be reliable. Since that was what I purchased them for I decided to sell them and return to the Glock platform. Glocks are certainly not the best fit for everyone, of course, but they warrant serious consideration depending on your intended purpose.