I have to laugh at quite a few of the posts made in this thread.
First of all, the version number. Who here hasn't learnt already that version numbering is pretty arbitrary everywhere? Some developers use it to show that they've reached a certain milestone, others never get to version 1 because they kind of see that as reaching perfection, others use it partly to show when a batch of security patches have been released, the list of different uses goes on. The only silly thing about the version number is, if it's true, that MS didn't put it up to 7.0 because of (potential?) compatibility issues. Personally I think Win7 is v6.1 because it is a patched-up version of Vista, however the OP's comment about it being "barely different" - I bet 9 out of 10 people who upgraded from Vista (usually because of performance issues) to it would disagree with you. There's an enormous performance difference.
Next, "OMG Win7 is crap because I installed an XP driver which didn't work, then I installed another one which didn't work". At the end of the day, every OS has its foibles, and to me, being familiar with Windows, it seems like you're saying "the A1200 SUCKS!!!111 because I couldn't install my 16-bit 3.1 ROMs into the 32-bit sockets it just wouldn't work!". You can hardly say an OS sucks because of a third party's drivers. If you would like to argue things that way, let's rate AmigaOS as highly as the Microsoft Basic software that got released with Workbench 1.x shall we? As for the large driver download which still didn't work, it could even be that you had a corrupted download (more likely just a crap driver, but hey).
Next, memory usage. I haven't seen a new PC with Win7 that has less than 2GB RAM (which I regard to be ideal for Win7). From what I've seen, a new install of Win7 (I've done a few already for customers), settles out at using about 600MB RAM, perhaps 800MB for the 64-bit version. That's leaving 1.2GB RAM for you to use. As far as I'm concerned, if an OS wants to use the resources available for any sort of operation, I don't mind as long as when I want it to do something, it is ready to do it quickly and responsively. IMO, Win7 is pretty good at doing that, whereas I think this was Vista's achilles heel (even with indexing switched off, which made little difference, the OS always seemed to be accessing the disk). I would be surprised if anyone can give an example of a modern, up-to-date OS for the average uses of a computer that doesn't have a similar resource footprint to Windows 7.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Windows fanboy, I think there are plenty of things that suck about Windows 7 especially. I think it's just about an adequate replacement for Windows XP (which I regard to the be the pinnacle of Microsoft's achievements) which will keep Microsoft afloat while it gets its development model in order, which went drastically wrong with Vista.
One of the points in this thread that I agree with is about the 64-bit version. I think 32-bit Vista shouldn't have happened, let alone 32-bit Win7. Backwards compatibility is to a certain extent a good thing, but Microsoft is pushing it way too far.
If you want to laugh at pointless releases, then surely Microsoft Office is a better target? Although there are plenty of pieces of software out there that simply bump up the version number because they made some trifling aesthetic change.
HP drivers - normally you can download a 'basic' driver, which does all the basics, the package is about a tenth of the size of the full-feature driver, and doesn't slow your machine up. I use that quite often (though I normally recommend Epson), and introduce customers to other methods of scanning in stuff.
