well..
Ive been with Vista for about 8 months now, on first use it was pretty good, liked it, it ran relatively fast. However it has now slowly mashed its own face in, runs like a dead horse and likes to perform random delayed actions.
I also transfer a number of files between external hdd's, and the timing that it gives seems to be taken from a random number generator as even when the files are the same size and going to the same drive they give completely different times.
In the new job i am using OpenSUSE, whilst not perfect as it has had some crashes with the desktop, it runs nice and quick and doesnt feel bloated in anyway. The message of this epic story is, if microsoft could produce something like opensuse, or any other linux distro then I would see no reason to use a linux distro.
I for one would have thought that Microsoft would have released a gamers edition of their OS, allowing it to use large amounts of ram, all the useless crap removed, and network and video usage optimized, this is a market that you could easily tap.