A few weeks ago I needed a new laptop in a hurry because I had to leave town on short notice. They didn't have any XP machines, so I went with Vista. And... I love it. I was really prepared to absolutely hate it, but I just don't.
User account control is the best, and the first thing I hear from others is that they immediately disable it and keep running as administrator. WTF? It's finally convenient to run as a standard user, and you disable it?!? Coming from a unix background, it's the most natural thing in the world. Need root? su -. I'd never dream of always logging in as root, yet every windows machine I've had I ran as administrator because it sucked so bad if you didn't. So people disable it, and then complain about how bad windows sucks when they accidentally click on HotPics.pps.exe and it overwrites /C/WINDOWS.
And allowing different network and firewall settings for different networks is awesome too. Plugged in at home? Disable software firewall. Plugged in at a hotel? Firewall the shit out of it. At work? Pick a third set of settings. And when you reconnect to your home network, it switches back to what you had it set at before you had to go live in a seedy motel for a week.
From what I've seen, I think most of the Vista hatred fits the category of contempt prior to investigation. At least that was me.
