so you buy a $500 video card and there are exactly ZERO games that take full advantage of it.

Clearly, you've never played Crysis.

It's the DRM. Many of the crashing problems seem to be Securom crashing, which causes the game client to exit to desktop imediately.

Most of the problems are being caused by the dual online accounts required. The Rockstar Social Club servers initially couldn't handle the volume, which was causing the game to crash on startup. And people were having problems getting Games for Windows live installed right with its dependencies (such as .NET Framework 3.5). My guess is something isn't quite right with the GTA4 installer.

It also needs you to upgrade to the latest Games For Windows release, which doesn't support Vista64 at the moment. So that's all the hardcore gamers with 4GB+ of ram out of the picture.

False. I have Vista64 and 8GB of RAM and am able to run GTA4 and GfW just fine.