I have to ask these questions because I suspect that the people complaining the most about Vista didn't really give it a fair chance.. The product is more than six months old, and if you had driver issues (with sound, video whatever), chances are those issues aren't there anymore.
Vista does take advantage of a high end graphics card. If you have an older system you just won't see the 3D translucent windows.. Otherwise it's not there..
How many people who said the system was slower were referring to pop-up windows, and did you just try turning off UAC (User Account Control) from the individual USERS control panel preferences? That would make you no less secure than Windows XP.. For those complaining about file copies taking longer than XP, that was true until they released a hotfix that was on Windows Update.. That's no worse than some of the Mac OSX 10.5 bugs of the same type.
Vista does have a very different memory modeling scenario than XP, and can take advantage of larger equipped machines.
I think we'll see SP1 of Vista about the same time we see XP service pack three.. What you miss with XP is accelerated WPF applications, which quite a few are beginning to show up, and I think the tables will turn on all of this for users..
This very much reminds me of the situation with Windows 2000 adoption many years ago, when they had to offer new drivers for the first NON-DOS version of Windows and NT replaced Windows 98/ME.. The manufacturers of third parties took months even after release to become compliant. There was much complaining going on then too.. But the reality of this is these 3rd parties had nearly two years to come onboard. Microsoft offered plenty of betas and didn't just spring this on them over night..
