Hi,
I'm a longtime AUCTeX user, and I've never felt the need of using Preview in my daily LaTeX editing. Prior to the inclusion of AUCTeX in the Emacs package manager there was the possibility of loading AucTeX and Preview separately, but now they are both loaded automatically. This in itself would be harmless if not for Preview changing the variable `LaTeX-mode-hook' *after* the init file settings. This is annoying, because other added minor modes to AucTeX basic major mode (such as LaTeX-math-mode, reftex-mode, cdlatex-mode) should be loaded manually, which is painful in sporadic Org-LaTeX buffers, for example.