It's probably fair to say that Vista wins the Turkey of the year award for 2007, narrowly beating the Western Digital NAS box that won't store any kind of media lest it be pirated
However, my Vista machine is superior to my XP boxes in every way & I'm delighted (so far) with it. It's homebuilt though & I made it with Vista in mind - E440 dual core, 2 gigs ddr2 & nearly 850 gigs hdd on an Asus P5L-VM mobo & it flies along, absolutely no problems at all, except for sleep. There's a known issue where just about any background process will wake it up, so you can't put it into sleep mode, fix due SP1 apparently.
It seems to me from this thread that Vista is just fine,
provided it's on the right machine, yet my guess is MS have cajoled, coerced & enticed the volume suppliers into shoe horning it into new boxes irrespective of the suitability of the system.