I don't know. Personally, I've stuck with XP for gaming. I know there's a bit of a push on Microsoft's part to get people to hop on the Vista bandwagon for games, since "only Vista supports the new Direct-X 10.0 extensions". Regardless, if you look at the side-by-side comparisons of current games running with Direct-X 9.0 and 10 support, you quickly realize the additional features in 10 are of minimal significance at best. (For example, Bioshock offered slightly more realistic-looking waves in the water when you ran around in it. But as they pointed out, you'd hardly notice this during gameplay. You almost need a screen-shot to study it, compared to a screen-shot of the same scene without it, to see the improvement.)
On the other hand, Vista boots noticeably more slowly when I've used it, and has a lot more "overhead" all the way around. I imagine it's pretty good at putting background tasks on hold and "stepping out of the way" when a properly-coded game is launched and tells the OS it needs all the system resources.... but I still don't like the sluggish feel outside the games.
Plus, XP has a 3rd. service pack coming along soon - and I believe some of the improvements in Vista are slated to get rolled into it too. Given that, I don't think you're really going to feel a need to "ditch XP in a year". Surely, it will be longer than that before you feel like driver support for new devices has "dried up".
