I'll chime in with my dissatisfaction about Vista. I recently bought a new computer that I thought would be a rocket ship. Dual core processors, 1 GB or Ram and a 250 GB hard drive should be pretty good. It was a total dog, running about as slow as my old Tandy TRS-80 with a cassette tape back up. It turns out that you really need 2 GB to run vista. Worse yet, a lot of Microsoft’s own programs wouldn't run on it without spending half a day installing updates. One program, Microsoft Front Page, never worked properly on it and MS did not have any patches to fix the problems. Their web site said they have discontinued the program and would release a replacement that was Vista compatible in a few months. That' nice, but I needed it to work right now.
I ended up returning the computer to the dealer, who was apparently quite used to getting Vista computers rectaly inserted by their customers. I tried to be very nice about it, and they fully refunded my money with no hassle. I'm now running a built from scratch XP Pro computer with similar specs to the one that came with the Vista package. The best news is it only came with an operating system and AVG anti virus software. It doesn't have any weird software in it for various ISP's, music services, porn sites, ink and toner sales, etc that lurk in most new factory assembled computers. It is a rocket ship.
There are some nice features to Vista, but IMHO, they are not worth the bother, at least not until they actually get it to work. It makes Linux look very attractive. I hear that Kubuntu is great....