Vista was the last straw for me. I bought a brand new Lenovo X61 Tablet with Vista business around Christmas time. I spent two months trying to get Vista working how I wanted it to. Blank screen freezes coming out of sleep, dirt slow data transfer rates to my NAS, software incompatibility, etc..... And this was after the hallowed Service Pack 1 that would fix all problems. At this point I "downgraded" to XP and redid everything. Now I just had the usual XP problems/quirks. About this time Gates and Balmer come out and say that Windows 7 will be great and build off Windows Home server (that corrupts data) and Vista. At that point MS jumped the shark in my opinion. While they will still sell millions I think their market share will continue to erode and Apple and other alternatives are sure to benefit.In my opinion, the Microsoft era of dominance is slowly fading.
I've been a PC guy since DOS 2.0 and never considered the Mac (pre X86) a serious machine for everyday use. I was also annoyed with the proprietary nature of most things Apple. I stuck my toe in the water and got an Airport Extreme base station. Well made, decent configuration utility, readable documentation and amazingly fast. I was impressed. After using a friends Mac Powerbook, looking at the OS and doing lots of reading I sold my X61 and yesterday ordered a Macbook. I'm jumping ship.