Yeah, Vista is pretty and can do some "cool"stuff, but if you have real work to do, Vista is an insult and a waste of time.
Wow... harsh. I do real work all day long on my Vista system. I am even able to do it at a pretty good pace. I can't think of anything that I could do in XP that I can't do in Vista (there may be something, but not off the top of my head).
It is fair to say that:
On the same hardware, XP is faster than Vista.
It is also fair to say:
Vista was written in an age of much faster hardware than XP was.
I would never try to install Vista on old hardware, it wasn't meant to do that. Actually, I take that back. MS does have a version of Vista for old and slow hardware, Vista "Standard", but I think it is only sold in third world countries or something.
Vista was written to be installed on modern, more capable systems. The bulk of the problems are created when computer builders and OEMs install Vista on "lacking" hardware configurations. They do this to meet a price-point to lure in the bargain shoppers. While the customers think they are getting a great deal, they are really being setup for failure. Had they spent a little more money and bought a system with another GB of RAM (or 3), a faster processor, and a little better video card, they would have had a much different, more pleasant experience.
Earlier, there were speed issues, even with capable system configurations, but SP1 seemed to solve those issues.
Laptops are a perfect example of this. A laptop, even though its specs look impressive, are rarely as fast as a desktop. This makes things even worse. If you skimp at all on a laptop, you may be in for a suprisingly slow experience. Turning off some of the whiz bangs may help, but a faster processor, faster hard drive, and more memory are better solutions.
I guess the biggest part of this is that it is "expensive" to buy a capable system. But I remember happily forking out several thousands of $$$ for my first PC, many years ago. To be honest, if I were to spend that same amount of money now (even without inflation), I would have a kick-ass computer.