cosmos100, I am aware of that. To be honest I prefer XP overall as I have had much more experience and use with it. There are some things I like about Vista, and some I dont. For example accessing files and manipulating them such as deleting, copying etc is a real pain in Vista, as is installing programs or changing "important System Settings". However, for browsing the net and word processing I much prefer Vista.
So I suppose it really depends on what you are actually doing. The majority of people who come into buy laptops either know nothing, only wanting to do the above mentioned activities, and they are fine with the more simpler laptops. Then there are people who know what sort of hardware they want, eg dedicated graphics on a laptop or build in tv tuner etc.
To me its not really a problem. If you are a hardcore gamer then you can still find copies of XP floating around, but in time (hopefully soon) Vista will take off with DX10 games. Although I was too young to remember what actually took place when XP came in, I can imagine it was very similar as I still have a couple of games laying around that wont run on XP.