For perspective, I got my work laptop with Vista because I expected my customers to be moving to Vista, and needed to be able to address their environments. What I've found...
- HP drivers worked only partially until I stumbled across someone from Microsoft who was handing out drivers on the sly. Don't know if he still is or not... but I've got his email.
- Some of the applications used by my company don't run or install on Vista. Yeah, we need to upgrade them... but there's no value-added reason to do that yet.
- Vista's error messages are occasionally misleading... such as "you don't have permission to access this" really meaning "this is actually stored somewhere else, and you have to access it there". Protection by obfuscation is hallucination.
- Sales don't lie... there's a reason that MS has decided to sell XP until 2010, and support it until 2014... And yes, *officially* you can't buy XP any more... unless, of course, you buy it from a smaller retailer (Asus, others).
What many corporate people are saying is that if they move to Vista, the return involved across the corporation does not justify the investment required. IOW, they're paying a lot to get not much in return... not much boost in performance or reliability. Hence the corporate decisions to upgrade slowly... when forced... while anticipating a better alternative along the way.
Doesn't mean Vista is bad. It means that Vista isn't yet more valuable than the cost to upgrade to it.