Indeed. The influences are prominent, but it is BeOS modernised, not BeOS reimplemented.

It's hardware requirements are little, even overlapping with BeOS on the low end. I have personally run Haiku beta5 on a 666Mhz Pentium 3 with 256MB of RAM (normally, I run BeOS on that machine, with 512MB of RAM). I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here, besides a general call to give Haiku a try on that old thinkpad, in a VM[0], or anywhere else really.

[1] If you're using virtualbox don't give it more than 1 cpu, virtualbox has a bug which makes haiku slow with multiple CPUs.