I have been using Vista since April 2007 and tbh I have no problems at all. I am very pleased with the way it performs.
As a great many other people are too. On a high spec PC and recent hardware with good drivers for Vista, it does perform very well indeed.
It just has too many niggles and weird broken stuff (slow copying of files across networks being the example that came to mind) to be accepted by the IT industry's techies.
The way MS are pushing Windows 7 at us, and so quickly (relatively) after the release of Vista, shows that they know they've not had the success with Vista that they had hoped for. Or maybe Vista was simply a mass-market test to see what the public really wanted in the already-planned "Windows 7"?? (cynic? moi?)
I can understand people who still use XP and have no wish to change(Why change when you are happy with something)I just wonder at some point whether Microsoft will force your hand .............
DirectX 10 is the lure for gamers, supposedly it really is that much better than DX9 (I've never seen it, so can't comment).
Then there's other Vista-specific software that might just have enough new features to make it worth the upgrade.
So I guess the forcing of the hand will come from software vendors (who may just happen to be MS partners
), perhaps moreso than from MS directly. It will happen though, eventually, unless the world moves over to linux, which isn't going to happen anytime soon!!