Vista should've been codenamed White Elephant.
I just leafed through Chris Pirillo's Vista Beta 2 feedback and had to chuckle. I don't know what OS X 'Tiger' or 'Panther' looked like 8 months before release, maybe they were in a similar kind of mess, but I doubt Apple had to contend with dialog boxes from the Windows 3.1 days!
The Vista release saga (now with extra delay!) is increasingly farcical to behold, especially in the light of the question “Who's waiting for this thing?”
To this outsider Vista sounds like Windows XP SP3.5 with a not terribly well conceived UI. Performance will be variable and reliability will continue to a problem as registry files grow and grow. I have no doubt that M$ will shift a bunch of units via OEM but will anyone actually go out and buy an upgrade to this turkey?
If I was a Microsoft stock holder I might be starting to give credence to the idea that M$ was deliberately depressing it's own stock price. [Curiouser and Curiouser!]