I think you have missed the point ... Windows 7 is fast, stable, reliable, looks nice ... it's everything Vista should have been. It's Microsoft's best Operating System so far. XP isn't as good ... Windows 7 has so many more productive ways of doing things, file manouvering, easy access to folders etc ... I love the favorites etc in the left explorer panel for instance ... and libraries ... you couldn't do that on XP. What about the fact that XP will not be supporting certain newer technologies ... I wonder if anyone will even bother making a USB3 driver for instance?
Think ahead
Also ... yes, Vista broke things. That was lazy, slow, ignorant developer's faults. The driver model was changed, for the right reasons. If 3rd Party developers had been on the ball, they'd have updated older hardware to work with the system. It was far from Microsoft's fault. They gave developers alpha copies and beta copies of Vista a year before it was released. However ... buy a Vista PC now and you'll find that it works fine. As since then, Vista driver support is solid. Also, for those that don't know, Vista and Windows 7 both use the same driver model. That's why Windows 7 works so much better, because developers now know and use the driver model as standard.
I mean ... maybe I can say all this coz I paid $0 for my copy of Windows 7 Ultimate (It was a gift)
I would still pay full price tho. I love it.