Most Mac OS Updates I'd consider service packs actually. That's why they have historically had a pretty quick turn-around time. Oddly enough, the one that on the surface seems like the most worthy of the title, Snow Leopard, is probably one of the ones with the most new technology under the hood.

What I'm getting at here is that Windows 7 doesn't magically erase the horrors of Vista and that for a lot of people, the same complaints are going to remain. It's been nearly another two years of spit and polish that by all accounts should have gone into Vista seeing how long it took to develop. I'm in a agreement with Rob, that Vista was more of a Beta product leading up to 7.

I'm not eager to jump into the Vista/7 pool right now and prefer the boring confines of NT/2000/XP. I've got two proper Windows systems and one virtual machine. One is running 24/7 and needs to be as stable as possible. That's XP SP3 right now with auto-updates turned OFF. I generally don't apply any patches to it as this has only burned me in the past. It runs as my PVR server which also handles music server duties and torrent duties. Basically a media acquisition/serving juggernaut. I infrequently run manual-input apps on it such as DVD Shrink and MP3Tag.

My other WInXP system is used for testing and some file management. It's also used as a repair platform for components, including disks, from the first. I also have XP installed in a VMWare session on my MacBok pro which I use for web browser testing and also music tagging. If/when I decide to check out Win7, it would probably be evaluated in a virtual machine first.