Well, I think the eeePC, OLPC and other forthcoming low-cost Linux systems are partly a reaction to Vista, and Microsoft's direction. The higher hardware requirements are keeping prices higher than they strictly need to be, not that the bigger PC makers are complaining.
For laptops in particular, solid state drives (SSDs) are a great idea, slowly coming down in price, but they're not up to HDD spec yet. Vista is a bit much for these drives, not just because of its size, but also because of all the other stuff it has going on in the background, writing to the drive. (Flash memory eventually wears out after a certain number of writes.)
I'm not exactly anti-Microsoft in general, but I wish they'd done things differently. I don't need the OS to do more, I'd like it to work on hardware that is more reliable. lighter, and yes, cheaper.
