That's because Vista is a typical Microsoft product: Software designed around a feature checklist without regard as to whether or not most people will actually need or want said features.
Before you ask, I was an SDE at Microsoft for five years (four years in the Business Division working on Office; one year in Platform Products working on Vista). In Redmond, new features always trump elegance and refinement. That's how they "win."
As for Vista, I use it every day. It's broken. I don't care how many features it has. It was rushed out the door by wrong thinking management who refused to hear that it wasn't ready. In fact, the entire Vista development cycle was the biggest train wreck in Microsoft's history and perhaps the ultimate embarrassment of a megalomaniacal corporation overflowing with arrogance.
Back on topic, just how much of your computing time do you spend managing files? For me it's less than 1%, and I'm an excessively organized individual who suffers from OCD.
In any case, I've never found Finder lacking for day to day stuff. I admit it's not great for heavy lifting, but that's where Terminal comes in. I also have the same pattern on Windows: Explorer for most tasks. Command Prompt when I need to reorganize a lot of files quickly. (Too bad cmd.exe doesn't hold a candle to bash, but that's another argument.)
As for Leopard, I think most people will be quite happy with the updated Finder. It has a nice, simple UI combined with some great refinements under the hood. It doesn't have to be
Path Finder because not everyone needs or wants that kind of complexity.
Yeah, instead of giving me a list of the strong points of the Finder, you tell me that we don't even need the Finder that much and that Vista, overall, is crap. Well, I agree that Vista, overall, is crap. But that's not the point. The point is the Finder is a very weak file management application and we are discussing what would be great additions to the Finder. There are some great, useful features in Vista's Explorer and file dialogs that I wish OS X had.
This is typical Mac zealotry, really. You guys like to say that feature X, Y, Z isn't needed until Apple adds it to their OS, and then the argument changes from "we don't need that" to "Apple did it much better". Yeah, Apple usually does do things in a more efficient, easier-to-use way. Apple is good at doing something that others are already doing but doing it better.
To answer your question, I work in the Finder all the time. I create projects for clients using Photoshop, Illustrator, Motion, After Effects, Flash, GoLive, Director, DVD Studio Pro, Cinema 4D, Soundtrack Pro. I also use Mail, Safari, Firefox on sites that Safari doesn't support, Yummy FTP, Preview, iTunes, PowerPoint, Excel, Word.
Each project I have includes dozens and dozens of files - new files created from scratch and also files that are already on the hard drive in other folders.
Having a metadata-driving file system would be very nice. It would allow me to just add tags to my files as they are created without requiring me to create a folder hierarchy for my projects like Project X: Photoshop, Motion, Backgrounds, 3D, Scripts, Audio...
File management is a big part of using a computer. Because the Finder is so weak, managing my files on OS X is more tedious than it has to be. This is one area of Windows Vista that is better than OS X, in my opinion. And any objective analysis I read on the Net seems to agree with this viewpoint.
But if you think having to manually set your view options for every folder is an easier way of doing things, go right ahead.
