I think that having used Vista for 8 months, having found every problem I have had and fixed on my old XP machine to be there and nigh-unfixable on Vista, as well as the fact that I have seen its array of svchosts taking to over 400mb of my precious 768mb of Ram at once, that I have every damn right to badmouth Vista if I please.
I'll give M$ the credit they deserve: As far as functionality goes, it has few problems aside from the five hours I spent turning off all the bullstuff 'user friendliness' systems that make copying a single god damn file from one folder to another take four damn minutes while I get some nine or ten alerts saying "THIS MAY CAUSE A PROGRAM NOT TO WORK PROPERLY" or "THIS FOLDER IS A SYSTEM FOLDER" (it says that for EVERY DAMN FOLDER, incidentally). Aside from those flaws which I spent a long time fixing up, its functionality has been fine. On the other hand, its OpenGL support has been lacking - this same machine with XP was somehow making use of four more OpenGL extensions without a single hardware change, and it tends to lag like ass whenever I try to have a window over the top of an OpenGL window (for instance, Blockland), and it has an odd bug with disconnecting from my wireless network for no reason and refusing to reconnect (It stops receiving or sending data to the network without internally saying it's no longer connected).
It has its fair share of bugs, even with SP1 (which mysteriously reset all my settings including my clock, cleared my cookies, my saved passwords, my wireless network data, and even removed the password from my user account when I installed it) but what pisses me off most is optimization issues. It tends to eat up my RAM, it often gets its processor usage unnaturally high while not actually doing anything I told it to (it has sat with one svchost taking 100% of my processor power for almost an hour and changed nothing at all), and things which ran much faster on XP on this hardware simply run so much slower. Not to even mention its defrag tool - it's actually faster to backup my important data, format my hard drive and reinstall than it is to defragment 50% of my hard drive, it doesn't tell me anything about the progress it's making or the fragmentation status. It's the first time I've actually needed to install a third party tool to do these basic maintenance operations.
Put simply, I'm backing up my music, my WIPs, formatting it and reinstalling XP. Updating to Vista was a waste of my time and money, although it was certainly a fun experiment while it lasted.