I used to be a highly tech savy individual. I had Vista years ago back when it was still code named Longhorn. The only reason I ever thought VISTA would be good was the new file system...which never came out when VISTA was released.
As far as all the eye candy goes, it is nothing more than a rip-off of the open source based accelerated graphics 3D desktops found on some Linux distributions. In fact, almost everything new in VISTA is a rip-off of open source projects used mostly on Linux.
When
Intel decides NOT to upgrade to VISTA as recently as July, 2008 after convincing Microsoft not to have per-core licensing with the multi-core Intel processors...well, that pretty much says it all IMHO.