I would say after setting up three Vista machines with most everything I can think of it's about the same as when I got XP for the first time, some things work, some need help to work and some won't at all. These are laptop and two desktops, two Basic version one Premium.
I will say like XP I bought the computers with the OS already on them so I don't have to hunt down working main drivers, I did the factory restore DVD's right off as who knows what was going to go on and may need to redo all - with the first one I bought XP Home upgrade as I thought I couldn't stand it any more when a few of my things wouldn't work, I partitioned the drive and dual booted, now I am back to Vista. Like my XP machines they all have their bugs, the laptop wouldn't share the HP all in one as a networked printer only as a local, one desktop won't read my flash drive at all - says error reading it, FrontPage 2003 gives me odd results on deleting files as a group. In short I have found some things work actually better and some not. So it does totally depend on what you want Vista to do on the machine you get.
Can't go by me tho, I started using computers when using Beta software was the fun thing to do and I have always jumped on the new OS band wagon as soon as it comes out - XP service pack 2 was a long time coming though and the best improvement to XP and I would imagine it will be the same with Vista. Going from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 still can't be beat but talk about not being able to get things to work - networking just my two computers back then was hours of work.
Northlite