Vista worked, and worked well enough to use on my daily driver PC's after SP's arrived. Entirely usable for the most part, but in comparison to 7 still a complete pig to me. If all a person had ever used was Vista, one would be none the wiser.
I've got Win 7 on my work laptop, a HP C2D with 4 gig (but its only 32 bit). Yes it boots faster than Vista Business, shut down is about the same, by about 5-7 seconds and in general use, Win 7 feels "snappier". Stability is the same. But here's the thingOver time Vista has actually got FASTER and more stable, but I have Vista Business fully up to date, and applied some of the registry tweeks, and this has sped it up significantly.
I think on release, Vista was half baked with its driver support, and many people that bought it had gigs of crapware installed like my HP laptop did. So when people got their PC, Vista would rummage through the hard drive building its index. Now if you had just come from XP, the constant indexing would have made the machine seem unusable. MS should have just told people turn on your Vista PC, leave it alone for a day or two, and then it will be much faster. Yep, I know, pretty crappy thing to say, but better than people downgrading to XP without giving Vista a chance.
Used all variations of it, 32 and 64 bit. Tbh, not sure I ever used the search functions of Vista or 7 much. I'm a bit particular about how I do things I suppose, and fell into habits 20 years ago I still use today, heh. I use the Start Menu and quick launch functions almost exclusively when mousing around, but for the most part I just have programs bound to G keys on my systems.
I don't know and no longer want to know where everything is kept, so I too now just use the search. Most of the people I work with are Gen Y and they all work with the search. Its fast, and I don't have to think "Now where is xyz?"