Hmmm
I've been using Vista for the past 2 weeks (got a release version via a Microsoft partner programme) and on the whole I find it better than XP. Just a few examples - Reasyboost allows you to use a flash drive (certain ones) as additional storage for the paging file giving you more memory to play with. The voice recognition built in is pretty cool. The search facility is a big improvement on what is in Xp (yes I know Mac users have had that for ages).
A lot of the problems can be solved by right clicking an application and selecting "Run as Administrator". not sure why you HAVE to do this if you are the only user of the machine but there you go!
As far as drivers are concerned - I put Vista on my 4 year old DELL laptop and Vista installed drivers automatically for all the hardware. Like all things one learns to live with (and maybe even forgive ) some of the 'features' when something is just out but I'm confident that as Microsoft release Service packs,  Vista WILL get better and people will actually love using it..
I moved my whole development environment over to Vista right in the middle of a project (maybe a foolhardy thing to do ) but at the minute there's nothing I haven't found a way round - yet (touch wood!)