Here's what seems to be a good review of the state of Vista.
Things that don't surprise me (after my short lived test of Vista at home)
1. It crashes, and crashes and crashes. Seems to be worse than the XP rollout, I really don't remember XP crashing this often, and I imagine it will slowly improve as the driver issues are addressed.
2. Lack of drivers.
3. Compatibility, even though the author discusses issues with games, I had issues with even Office and Office 2007. I won't even go into the nightmare that was virtualization, except to say that my machine randomly rebooted at LEAST once a day, without anything else installed or running besides Office and World of Warcraft. I mean that I would come home and the machine will have rebooted during the day while I wasn't doing anything on it.
Surprises
1. He likes the new start menu? I thought the new menu system was confusing, it kept changing in no descernable pattern depending on what I was doing. If things had been easier with the context menu changes I wouldn't have minded.
2. He's more efficient with Vista. I honestly found the opposite, mostly because of the confusing menu's and screens.