The BIG concern is the impact on non-Windoze, even non-Vista, systems.

Hopefully the Asian manufactures will continue to produce pre-Vista "legacy" designs for use in non-Vista systems, in order to protect the rest of us from the increased costs and lack of choice and/or updates which may well occur from the complexity and sheer make-work US-based computer manufacturers are in for at least in the near term.

And it certainly does the current issue of proprietary drivers for FOSS system no favours.  (But perhaps that was part of the goal?)

Saw an industry report recently that Vista had added $100 to the cost of production of the "average" PC sold in USA - that represents a whopping 25% increase over 2006 costs - for the same user experience.  (Remember that Vista Basic which will undoubtedly often be sold on this level system has none of the new UI features:  it's XP on DRM.)  Clearly some of that was increase OS royalty costs, but this article shows where much of this increase really comes from.