I decided to take the plunge and try running Vista on a daily basis. Thus far the following casualties must be reported:
Given my previous experiences on my two laptops, it really turns out that the graphics drivers (or lack of) are the #1 issue for getting productive with Vista.
Let's see how long it takes until I hit a snag that makes me return to XP. Copying Application Data stuff to Vista was already quite "interesting" because Firefox and Thunderbird store their settings in Roaming and not Local.