Boy, now you are speaking for the entire population of the USA - you must know everyone. I buy my software at Costco - so I do usually find it to be a bit cheaper than MSRP, but the fact is that buying an OS is a substancial investment. Many others buy it at Target, Walmart, Amazon or elsewhere, where the price is pretty darn close to MSRP. For me to part with ~$250+ requires some justification. And no, I see no reason why I should rush out and buy a copy of Vista, so I can upgrade my XP machine, then go out and buy Win7 to finally get current.
The fact of the matter is that Vista is a POS, Win7 is allegedly what Vista was supposed to be. As for bloat during the upgrade - since MSFT wrote the OS for both WinXP, Vista and Win7 - gee, I would hope they would be competent enough to know what they needed and what they didn't. There shouldn't be ANY bloat. We both know there will be, but there is no excuse for it.
What I would expect, is some solutions to be forthcoming from MSFT. For example, a stand-alone application that writes everything you will need (pictures, email, contact info, bookmarks, cookies, et. al.) to a blank CD or DVD. Perform the upgrade to Win7, then have the program retrieve your data from the CD/DVD(s). I mean, WinXP has a Backup utility built in - free of charge. Why can't people simply use that?
*The fact of the matter is that Vista is a POS*
I use it every day - what issues should I be seeing? The systems in question are under medium to very heavy loads.
Give me reproducible examples and I will attempt to replicate them.
I use Clonezilla to make an image of a PC:
http://clonezilla.org/
I use SyncToy to backup my files: http://www.microsoft.com/prophoto/downloads/synctoybeta.aspx