You can say it all you want, it's still not believable. You're not even up to the minimum RAM, having at most 448 MB (512 - minimum graphics memory for Aero). You have to be swapping like crazy on that slow laptop hard drive. 2 GB RAM means relatively little swapping, BIG difference.
This is no different than all the bellyaching we saw when XP came out about how horrible it was that Windows 98 and 2000 were being replaced since XP was only “eye candy”.
I never understood that about XP either, as there are major under the hood improvements, although pre-SP1 stability wasn't as good as 2K. Some people just resist change (I saw resistance to going to Win95 from 3.1), and I bet a good portion of Vista criticism is by such people. But other criticism is perfectly valid.
Another thing I didn't understand about XP was Microsoft's decision to consult Crayola on the color scheme. I ran XP without themes (looks like 2K) until skinning software got good. At least this time Microsoft just tried to copy Apple (although not too well).
If you leave themes turned on with XP, you can just use the Silver color scheme and it looks much better than the XP Cartoon Plus one.