It has, in certain circles. Vista x64 with 4+ gigs of memory is win. Vista x86 with 1-2 gigs of memory is lose.
Yes, Vista is a "ram hog," you can mitigate that to an extent by turning off SuperFetch but the interface plus all of the services it has to run will take up about 700MB-1.2GB of memory on boot. That's on x64, so it's probably less on x86.