Haha... you know, its actually entertaining to hear anyone say that Vista is any improvement on XP.
I go to Digipen, which is a major programming college, and, as part of a deal with Microsoft, we get some of their software over a thing called MSDNAA (is an education alliance deal). Believe it or not, they recently added Vista professional to the package, and some of the students and faculty have Vista currently installed on their machines.
The short version: Vista is a complete piece of crap.
The end user will probably like Vista, simply because it is pretty and it will (seem to) do the simple stuff that they want to do pretty well. On a deeper level, though, Vista simply fails. In many ways, our students have likened restoring XP on their machines to upgrading Vista to XP.
Besides the obvious problems, such as the whole content protection debacle (short side note: I didn't know that, thanks to some millennium law passed, its technically illegal to watch DVD's on a Linux machine. Look it up if you have the chance), Vista has numerous holes that simply make it unreliable (one such hole, its seeming inability to effectively network to XP computers, screwed a team project we had this weekend), and sadly, they probably won't be fixed for a couple of service packs.
Take it from people with experience. Don't get Vista.
--Jack Kieser