Good luck. Vista is a monster on resources. I barely got it to run on a 3.4GHz PC with a gig of RAM. There was allot of click and wait when trying it out. It has a very slick installation and the environment reminds me a little of KDE from the Linux world. It will definitely be a learning curve for some of the less savvy windows users, because there's allot of changes.
If you like the CLI scripting available in Linux, you might what to take a look at PowerShell. RC2 came out about a week ago. Runs on W2K3 Server and XP SP2 with .Net 2.0.