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At this point there isn't much I can tell you about Windows Vista that you probably haven't already heard, so consider this entirely subjective, but I really like Vista. I installed Vista through Apple's Bootcamp in order to test Office 2007 and have since converted that installation to a Parallels-based virtual machine.
As Leander [noted recently][1] on Cult of Mac, Vista is screaming fast when you run it natively on recent Mac hardware and I'd agree with him that Vista "feels" faster than OS X in many respects.
On moving my installation over to a virtual machine, the speed dropped off considerably, but it's still very usable. Vista performs at speeds roughly the same as XP (also running in a virtual machine), but I did find that disabling the Aero effects sped things up quite a bit. Your own experience will depend somewhat on how much RAM you allow Parallels to allocate to Vista -- I'm giving it 640MB.
Quite frankly I did not expect to be particularly impressed with Vista, but I am. I like the design, it has a very dark, classy look to it. You can dismiss that as irrelevant if you want, but I appreciate well thought out design choices and Microsoft certainly pulled out all the stops with Vista.
Of course I'm not using Vista extensively, I don't have to live in it. If I did, you can bet I'd be complaining about DRM and peripheral support among other things. If you're seeking an objective point of view, have a look at Bruce Gain's [recent article][5].
I now have four operating systems running on my Macbook, OS X, Vista, XP and Ubuntu Linux. Granted most people don't test and write about software for a living so you might not have any need for such diversity, but it's certainly doable if you're interested.
For the most part I still work in OS X, but using [Firefox][2] for browsing, [Thunderbird][3] for email (IMAP), and [emacs][4] for writing I'm able to get more or less the same experience across all the platforms.
And I'm learning to rely less on vender specific software and more on cross-platform solutions so that the tools I need for my day to day work needs are platform independent. I like Vista, I like OS X and I like Linux, but I don't want to be tied to any of them.
[1]: http://blog.wired.com/cultofmac/2007/01/running_vista_o.html "Running Vista on a Mac"
[2]: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ "Firefox 2"
[3]: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/releases/2.0b2.html "Thunderbird Beta 2"
[4]: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ "emacs"
[5]: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/reviews/0,72295-0.html "Why You Don't Need Vista Now"
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