DJAT said:
This is completely wrong. Yes, Vista has a new interface, but if you look at it twice, you'll think it's just a new theme. You know, Vista transformation pack can make XP look like Vista. So, if you think Vista is nothing, you're completely fooled.
1. Vista's GUI is completely hardware accelerated. So it can demo all those nice graphical effects in a smoother manner, but this is not the important thing. You paid money for a video card right? What's the use of it if it is not used most of the times. You don't play video games 24/7, do you? As Vista's new interface is driven by the video card, it makes use of that idle video card and relieves the CPU from painting the GUI.
2. You paid for your RAM right? How much of your RAM is used by Windows XP? Maybe 500MB of 1GB? Why did you pay for that remaining 500MB if it's not used most of the times? With Vista, your RAM never goes unnoticed. I have 2GB RAM in my PC, and guess what? I have only 2-10MB left right now. It will cache everything it can, so things load faster than XP. The newly introduced feature called Superfetch will track what you do for about a week or so, and tune Vista to match that usage pattern. Vista is faster than XP in most of the times in general usage, but you have to give it some time. Unlike XP, Vista doesn't seem to degrade in performance after few weeks of usage.
3. Have you noticed certain programs you have had minimized for hours taking a considerable time to restore the Windows when you click on it? I mean, the redrawing of the Window of that program will take few seconds right? The only way you could solve this issue in XP was to remove the pagefile, stop paging of the kernel and tune the RAM for more system cache. But with Vista, you don't have that problem, mainly because of its native caching algorithms.
4. DirectX 10 is going to be awesome, but you will need a DX10 supported video card

I have heard that the DX10 performance compared to DX9 is around 10 times. I can't believe this either, but we'll have to wait and see on this.
5. Security is a lot higher than that of XP. User Account Control will turn out to be a headache to a user who is used to work fast, and who uses the PC carefully. But for casual users, UAC will provided a higher layer of protection. Unlike XP, the administrators do not have all the previledges unless you disable UAC.
Anyway, I'm not saying Vista is perfect, and they have shred out some of the features originally planned for Vista. And there is the program incompatibilities and more importantly, lack of final versions of drivers. Vista is running stably for me. The only problems I have faced up to now in this particular setup are two explorer.exe hangs.