At present time, Vista is in pretty much the same situation as XP was after introduction.

When You compare Win98 to Win XP, until SP2, XP was to buggy, to slow, quite unstable, and practically useless as an operating system for doing some serious business.

The history repeats now, Vista is still in some kind of "unfinished state", some great features announced a year ago are missing (indicating that the OS was finished in a hurry for a marketing reason), some features (security) is so lossy implemented so most users are turning it off, current XP drivers are useless and new drivers are very few, laptop users experiencing very low battery autonomy (compared to XP), program compatibility is also an issue, so You have to check each specific program to test if it would work.

All in all, no matter what You hear, do not buy Vista (e.g. downgrade from Vista to XP if You were "forced" to buy it). Otherwise, you might be investing Your money into busted product (remeber Windows MilleniumEdition).