Wow, what's with all the hate toward Vista and Windows 7? Is this coming from personal experience or just what the "blogosphere" says? I could understand if this was January 2007, but Vista's 3rd party driver stability has improved a ton since then (yes, Vista's stability problems were in fact caused by bad 3rd party drivers, most notably from Nvidia). And service pack 1 fixed just about anything else that cause people trouble.
Do you all think that just because there was a 6 year lag between XP and Vista that Microsoft wants to wait another 6 years to release a new OS? Vista has been the exception to every single rule of every OS that MS has ever released. Every OS has been released no more than 3 years from the previous one except Vista. Service Pack 1 was the only service pack ever released that couldn't be easily integrated with the OS before installing it and that won't be happening again.
The reason you're having trouble finding XP is because, like all Microsoft software, it reached its end of retail life (planned long before Vista was released). If you needed a copy that bad, you should've bought one before the end of July (I believe it was July of this year that its retail sales were ended). It was very well publicized that you wouldn't be able to get it after July 31st. Do you seriously think Microsoft should just continue to sell and support all versions of their OS until the end of time? Windows 95 and 98 reached their end of sale and support life cycles a long time ago, but nobody bitched about that even though some people are still running it.
Vista has plenty of new features to bring to the table, not the least of which is better memory management and better search capability. And if you're running with 4 GB or more of RAM, the 64-bit version of Vista has much better driver support than XP ever did. Vista also has much better support for multi-core systems. Since most new systems are running multiple cores, you're much better off with Vista than you would be with XP.
If you've just upgraded to Vista, then don't worry about Windows 7. Yeah, they're leaving the same basic kernel architecture intact. What does that mean? It means that all the software you're running on Vista right now will work just fine on Windows 7. It means all your drivers will work just fine too. Why would you expect another major change? XP used the same basic kernel architecture as 2000 and 2003 used the same basic architecture as XP (which is why games that work on XP work just fine on 2003), so it shouldn't surprise anyone that they aren't changing that for Windows 7.
I've used Vista extensively myself. When it was first launched (pre-SP1) the only trouble I had was slow file transfers. It was actually faster on the same hardware than XP was, with all the eye candy turned on. It was the first OS Microsoft ever released where I didn't want to disable any eye candy because it was fast and actually improved the OS. After SP1, slow file transfers were fixed and I haven't had any problems with it. I actually leave UAC turned on too because it let me know if anything weird was going on.
Ferris, if Dell sold you a computer with the XP downgrade option and didn't include drivers for XP, your beef is with Dell, not Microsoft. Dell is responsible for making sure you get all the drivers you need, not Microsoft. If you had built the computer yourself, then you'd be the one that would have to make sure everything had XP drivers. Most large manufacturers do still provide XP drivers, so they shouldn't be that hard to find.