I wasn't a big fan of hers, but she did some things right and a lot of things wrong. She got right Britain's stance on terrorism right, she got the Falklands back (and Fred, I really couldn't give a flying fuck about your opinions on that) and she also was a strong leader when the country had had far too many weak-kneed morons for years. She went toe-to-toe with Scargill and helped to destroy the idiot left. She also stood up against the cronyism of her own political establishment (such as the jobs-for-the-boys Oxbridge types) with varying success - MI5 and MI6 are now more open to people from other backgrounds than they ever were before.
On the other hand, she destroyed trade unions (they were tied into what I call the 'idiot left', the ones who saw every strike as the first stage in a socialist revolution and who couldn't see that sometimes what people want is a better deal at work and not social upheaval) with the end result that we've had to fight to get even minimum wage established, she and her friends saw nothing wrong with selling off national institutions and putting people on the dole while they lined their own pockets, she was responsible for the destruction of the inner-city and also for taking away excellent learning opportunities for young people (like apprenticeships) and replacing them with nonsensical ideas like YTS which had no value and the qualifications weren't worth the paper they were printed on. She screwed the NHS over (she wanted a private healthcare system like the US has) and that mess is still trying to be sorted out, some 23 years after she left power.
I'm American, but unlike many of my fellow countrymen, I knew all that. I also have a neutral opinion on her.
She divided opinion in life and will do so in death: I applaud her for changing a lot of things that needed to be changed, but after the '87 election she lost sight of what the country needed and just went with what her party wanted, which basically was screwing the entire nation over in search of a quick buck. She riled the EU (she had been against turning the back on the Commonwealth in place of trading with the EU) and was good at calling them out on their own bullshit, like France continuing to sell Exocet missiles to Argentina during the Falklands, this broke EU (or EEC as it was then) trade laws (a members state can't sell to a country at war with another member state), she forced through the law that changed the amount of money people could take on holiday (in 1979, you could only take £50 on holiday, these days it's about £500). And she stood up to terrorists. I can't see Tony Blair, Gordon Brown or David Cameron doing that.
But she and her party fucked Britain over, with the economic boom came more unemployment as companies were bought and sold by people who couldn't give a damn about the workforce, the inner-cities were soon starting to look like the set of a Mad Max movie (In Edinburgh in the 1980's, you could buy a city centre flat for about £2000: It would cost you over a million for the same flat now), she left a legacy of youth who struggled to find work (me included) when we left school: All the apprenticeships had gone and the places where our forebears had worked had been sold by some city trader who couldn't have found it on a map. The country was in a bad place when she came to power, but it wasn't much better off when she left.
