Call 100, I think your comments about waiting for bug fixes have been true of pretty much every MS OS since DOS 1!! They have a history.
In fact, XP is a poor choice, because it was one of the better OS releases right from RTM.
Windows 7 has a similar relationship to Vista as XP had to 2000, in that in both cases it was an evolution of a revolutionary design. It built on the good points of its predecessor, and tried to eliminate the negatives.
Having had Win9x both at home and at work, I couldn't wait to junk it in favour of Win2K. And having had Win2K, I couldn't wait to adopt XP, which was significantly better - and that was even prior to SP1!! It improved so many things that didn't work well in 2K, and provided support for new technology - particularly wireless.
Most of the bad press about Vista was about how crap it was as an OS, rather than how many bugs it had. It wasn't seen as a great OS with some teething troubles, it was seen as a horribly intrusive OS with lots of teething troubles.
Win7 seems to have addressed many of the issues people had with Vista core functionality, processes and features, resulting in a better, faster, less intrusive and more efficient OS.
Am I rushing to upgrade to Win7? No - simply because at this stage there is nothing there that I need to have, as opposed to might like.
If I thought that Win7 would provide features and functionality that would allow me to do things that I cannot do with XP, or that I could do significantly better, then I would certainly consider adopting it - prior to SP1, even!
It's a pretty simple cost-benefit analysis - pain & cost of changing vs. gain by changing.
SD