Vista - About to be put out of its misery

Vista has been a massive flop for and with Microsoft realeasing Windows 7 in October it's clear they want to move on.  MS will tell you that they have sold over 200 million copies of Vista - and while that might be true it's very misleading.  Take the 3 laptops in the picture right, they were sold running Vista but with an XP 'downgrade' option which I am exercising here whilst preparing them for an office that remains standardised on Windows XP.

So why was Vista a flop?  Well everyone has an opinion but here are a few of mine.
1) Business don’t replace their PC's as often as MS would like and often skip an OS as a result.  Many offices went straight from NT4 to XP without ever buying a copy of Windows 2000.
2) When Vista came out I predicted it's biggest problem was that XP worked so well no one would want to upgrade - I think I was right!
3) Users are very quickly irritated when the interface is changed.  I hear people say they 'hate' Vista - and I couldn’t even publish what they say about Office 2007!  If you’re going to change things you had better make the new system massively better than the old one or I'll keep on hearing the phrases 'if it isn’t broke don’t fix it' and 'why couldn’t they have just left it as it was?’ being bandied around offices.

So will Windows 7 be any better?  Well the previews are all very positive - but - all the new features seem like incredibly minor additions / changes / fixes.  It really sounds like the finished version of Vista and, if it is stable and compatible then I’m sure people will start to buy new PC's with it on (I bet we never see a 'Vista Downgrade!').  I’m sure enthusiasts will love it but for people who just want to get their work done.... well I just hope they haven’t moved things around too much!