Thoughts on condition of this watch?

Yea that's pretty nice for a 2531.80, very few of them look that good these days so I'd be pretty happy with it, they're a fantastic watch

@OmegaBorder if you're still looking at 2531s, one of the classic signs of polishing to look for on these is whether or not the scalloped bezel knurls still have any geometric lines to them or if they are smooth and wavy like the example you have shown here. These are thinly proportioned watches and it's difficult to find an example that hasn't had some of the geometric texture polished away.

Good luck with your hunt. I tend to agree with others here- that's not a bad example and a fair standard of what to shoot for.

Contrast the bezel scallops on the one you were looking at to this:



What you will see is that the scalloping has very slight straight line geometry to it, and as these bezels get polished this can be lost if not done carefully, and it becomes more of a "wave." Each one of the scallops- the tiny slices out of the bezel-- result in a lot of fine surfaces that are easy to polish away and a really bad polishing job will make this look like a sine curve that has been bent into a circle.

Your example is about what I would expect if this was an original bezel that had been polished a couple of times. I've seen much worse examples. You can have omega replace the entire bezel with a full service, and if you find one with a good case and dial, I would strongly consider doing this but it's not cheap.

The other area that often gets over polished is the lyre lugs, which often lose the crispness and become rounded out or even shortened dramatically. And of course a bad polishing job will also result in improper finish texture.

Unless you want to pay a premium for a fairly unworn example I would say that purchasing one with some light polishing like you are showing above for a reasonable price would be the way to go. If you have a slightly higher budget you can always use the difference to send it to Omega. @502 to right has done this with pretty fantastic results.