I had reservations about Vista myself, but honestly I've had no complaints about it so far. It took me an hour or so to figure out how to disable the annoying shit, eye candy, and resource-hogging unneccesary services, and now it runs fine and pretty much looks and acts much like my old Win2K installation from a UI standpoint.
That said, however, that I got Vista with a new (and significantly better) system, rather than trying to install it on the older box I had Windows 2000 on. I suspect that it is a bigger resource hog than 2K/XP, but on my new system (E6850/2GB/8800GTS) it still runs much faster than 2K on my old system (XP2500+/512MB/GF6100). I can now play DX10 games and use other software that doesn't work on 2K, and I have had no problems with any of my existing software so far. Granted, there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to buy it beyond the whole "new software won't work in 2K/XP in the near future" aspect. Compatibility with new stuff was pretty much the only reason I went with Vista instead of XP.