I went to Best Buy today to see Vista. It looks mostly the same, but just flashy and maybe a little harder. One thing to note, new pc's and laptops are really, really cheap right now. My IT friend says Vista is a memory hog. Don't even attempt with less than a Gig of RAM.
That's why sales are down as against XP (well, that's one of the reasons). Who the hell wants to go out and buy anywhere between $50 and $500 worth of RAM that you currently don't require just so you can pay $159 or more for an OS you don't really need? Or, in my case, a new computer would be required, as my notebook has 1Gb max memory - not nearly enough for Vista, due to shared display resources. Then, I'd have the pleasure of dealing with involuntary DRM disabling, conflicting resources, unsupported drivers...etc., ad nauseum. My next computer will either be a Mac, or I'm switching to Linux.
My Vista purrs right along with 1 gig of RAM. Right now I have Firefox (with 5 tabs open), Outlook, Word, and Messenger running and still have 525MB of free RAM left.
I love Vista.