Vista laptop is fine!
Main problem with Vista is on desktops where people want to have more than say, 4 monitors. A 4+ monitor setup in Vista gets tricky and more expensive than in XP.
I recently bought 2 Dell systems with Vista/RAID-0 which I was very happy with. Until I got to the point of adding video cards.
As a result, I've installed XP on 1 of those and do so on the other.
I don't like Vista's video card options.