Do you remember what happened when OSX came out? None of Macs software worked, but people didn't complain about like they do with Vista.
I'll admit, when Vista first released, I had many issues, but that was mostly because NVidia or Creative didn't release Vista drivers until later. They were all unstable, old beta drivers. Now my PC runs better than any I've ever pwned.
I did get a red screen of death once tho. I ran Crysis demo at 1920x1200 Max graphics with 2900xt and a q6600. Bad idea. 1fps for a few min then.... BOOM~!
ah but apple included a way to run older apps on osx, you could install os7/8/9 on a virtual install to give you the ability to run those apps, go check it out, ms SHOULD do something simlar to this for windows 7, not drop all past apps, but cut out lagacy app support as a default componant, apps like windows nt3/4, and 9x/dos apps, 2k,xp,2k3/vista are all in the same family and based on the same root core, so supporting those apps shouldnt be a big problem or cause perf or stab problems.
as to your assertion that vista is better because it lets task manager run no matter what, try having nvidia drivers go into "recovery" mode, it will lock on most any game/app that causes the drivers to trigger recovery mode, this is true in ALL windows versions, and task manager at times will show 100% cpu use by that app once you manage to get it open.
server 2003 and x64pro both will give task manager precedence over hung apps, and just like vista, it make take a few seconds for task manager to show up, OR you may be forced to just wait for gpu recovery to....well recover if its nvidia( ati's recovery tends to go smoother in my exp)
as to other hangs, i used vista for a solid month and really really tryed to like it, ms gave me vista ultimate, i just couldnt get past all the buggs and lack of what i consider polish.
xp was bad when it came out, but at least IMHO it was more polished then vista, and 2k, when it came out the only ppl who cryed it sucked where those who eather didnt have compatable hardware OR who didnt have enought ram, other then that 2k was a godsend, it worked just as well or better for gaming and work as my dual boot 98se and nt4( 98se=toy os....no good for working on important projects) when i got ahold of 2k, i started checking, only thing i had in any of my systems that i couldnt get decent drivers for was the rage128 videocard(back then ati's driver support for anything but 98 was abizmal)
XP was and still in my book is just patched beta ware, where server 2003 and x64pro are what xp SHOULD HAVE BEEN, and WOULD HAVE BEEN had ms given them the time to finnish getting xp to the state where it was server stable, but, alas, ms likes to push things out early, so we got xp with lots of buggs insted of 2003 with very few.
I use to be an ms beta tester, i beta'd ME,nt5/2k(started being called nt5 then name changed to 2k), xp, 2003, in all those experiances, i would put 2k and 2k3 as the best experiances, 2k early on was buggy as hell, but they where working out a new driver model and getting down the basick system manager vs the old skool nt3/4 management software(ewww) xp, in beta was horrible, unstable, unreliable, and alot of errors atributed back to the theming services, system restore and other noob babysitting services.
vista, well i tryed it in beta a few times, then the open beta, dispite not being in the beta i ofcorse can get ahold of them( lost my os beta access because i was offline during signup for a few betas ms offered me)
vistas task manager is just that of server 2003( and x64pro since its just server 2003 x64 in pro mode)
guess it could be worse, you could be bragging about how great noobuntu