My son put vista on his Sony VAIO.
Slowed it down to a crawl. But looks quite pretty - if you like playing with a PC rather than doing something useful with it
I'd give it a year. It doesn't actually do anything that XP doesn't do.
I am still on win2000. It does everything XP does, except run Pinnacle or Ulead with a HD video camera; one has to have XP for that for some reason.