It’s way, way, way too early to be making decisions about an OS upgrade that’s nearly a year away, but Dwight Silverman has some preliminary thoughts in a well-written review entitled Vista’s nifty, but it’s not irresistible:
I’ve been playing with the latest test version of Vista for several weeks and spent some time at CES getting questions answered by Microsoft. I’ve not yet seen a feature that made me sit up and say, “Wow, I must have that.”
I think it will be the whole of Windows Vista that may be its selling point, rather than one or two killer features. If its value is greater than the sum of its parts, Microsoft will have a compelling product. If not, consumers may just yawn and keep using Windows XP.
Some quick reactions:
I think for a hard core of power users, there will be some compelling features. The most noteworthy is the core set of Media Center capabilities, which will be built into the base operating system. For anyone who owns an Xbox 360, the combination will allow you to stream music, pictures, videos, and TV from the den to the living room with ease.
Also, features aren’t as important as how capabilities of the OS are leveraged in applications. If there are any new programs that leverage Vista features (especially the improved file management and search tools), those could provide a compelling reason to upgrade.
Finally, don’t overestimate the importance of upgrades. Historically, upgrades represent well under 10% of the total market for any Windows version. Within a few months after its release, Vista will be on every new consumer PC. The job of a new OS is to take advantage of new hardware capabilities and to deliver an experience that makes the buyer happy they got that new PC.
Ed Bott 
Interstingly while looking at Vista at CES my wife noted a theme of making things easy for the everyday user. So while geeks may not see the a lot of changes the average user will see the benefits, and thats what its about I guess
I think Vista is a release for developers to exploit and build on, to bring us some innovative applications and experiences to really take advantage of it. The great things for me is the new Windows Media Player with the Album Art in Library and the new MCE as you mentioned. I love the new components such as Windows Calendar and Photo Library, they really are needed features in Windows when it comes to handling information and digital memories.
I have been reviewing beta 1 for some time now and the feeback i am sending to MS is mostly about how the UI features will benefit the average user. After 5 years of XP, i could write a volume of all the niggles there are with XP, one of the most noticable being no standardisation for developers when building programs. Especially for freeware, the differences between windows and apple in this area are stark, hopefully MS will finally provide clear guidlines on the UI so ugly interfaces are a past stigma and Ms can work towards the beauty that apple have achieved with tiger
i think it will be worth upgrading.
is it the best though but i think it is
look at the UI.But for some reason i think
the UI is just to get people to buy it.
I have posted numerous times to let people know not to buy this worthless thing. Sure many features to boast about, but If you like being stuck with one nice looking skin and not being able to use half your old software/hardware (in my case anyways, you might get better or worse results). I paid somewhere around 250$ for the uprgrade from XP Pro, after about 3 weeks, I uninstalled it, put XP back, and put Vista Ultimate up for sale on amazon. I’m not alone either, many have done this. As I’ve said before, this OS is either released too early, or a cheap cover for an OS that hasn’t had many major renovations (alot of the core is still that of Windows NT, which hasn’t changed in years, and Vista is no exception) I’ll tell ya, when I reninstalled XP I honestly felt like I was “Upgrading” everything runs faster and more reliable now, and the 100% hardware support is also nice. (And my system is an average up-to-date dual core/SATA/DDR run of the mill newer system, nothing that should be unsupported, I wont bore with details any longer)
Don’t let WPF fool you, it looks nice, but as they say, beauty is only skin-deep. Don’t let Microsoft charm you into buying this pretty but disappointing OS.
Windows Vista, IT’S DEJA VU: Windows ME