2 GB is more than enough for Vista and most apps on it, I play Oblivion with that amount of ram on my Vista box. But back to the point, if you want to have a fair comparison of the two you have to set up things respective to what ‘era’ of computing they were built on. Obviously XP is going to perform exceptionally well with 1 gig and a 1.8 Ghz dual core processor, but Vista being the newer and beefier OS needs more as it was designed for the future as was XP was when it came out so doggedly slow in 2001 and didnt hit it stride for a couple of years. So comparing the two is disingenious at best if they don’t have comparable parts in respective to their system requirements.
I would not even think of moving to Vista until the hardware that will "run Vista screamingly fast" drops down to that price range.
I've always installed MS operating systems about 2-3 years after they come on the market. But I will pass on Vista regardless because of (1) the DRM issue and (2) the lack of any compelling features in Vista.
Yes and no. Sure on the one hand the machines an OS was “designed” for give a fairer comparison, but real world usage is on flat machines. You’re going to buy a machine with a set of statistics and you’re going to want the most out of that machine, so comparing the two on identical hardware is reasonable. And they did make the machine better than MS says is the minimum for Vista, so it’s not like they cut it’s knees out from under it.