So, is Vista really so bad?

To the amusement of my friends, I bought a Vista laptop the other day. Until now I've been using XP on a Lenovo (nee IBM) ThinkPad X60s. That's able to pass below radar of Mac aficionados. But for various reasons, including that I cracked the plastic case on my X60s and I'd had the machine 15 months, I passed it on to my 13 year old son and decided to get an X61s. And it was 25% off. I love the form factor of the X40/X60 and was concerned that it would be abandoned. I've got a docking station and extra batteries and figured that the upgraded processor and video card would be worth the X60s to X61s transition. And it has been so far. I'm able to keep my 1280x1024 screen resolution on my external monitor and 1024x800 on the laptop as an extended screen, not something I could do on the X60s, which limited me to 1024 on both machines. That's a very important upgrade for my work. But the killer to my friends is that I ordered the new machine with Vista. What's the problem? My wife's Macbook seems to crawl periodically on OS X when she's using a browser. I really like the Vista interface. Am I completely naive? We'll see . . .