This. Windows 7 seems to be more optimized (The main thing imo) and a new taskbar, but is mostly tweaks over Vista. Not worth paying money for.
But just like for owners of XP it wasn't worth paying money for Vista as an upgrade on that it's not worth it for owners of Vista to spend money on 7. XP > 7 though is a little more wortwhile, though tbh XP still runs 99% of everything out there. (Single exception being DX10+, without cracks?)
I like the look of how Windows 7 is turning out though myself, so I'll most likely go and buy it when it is released.
See this is where I have a problem, I have got so used to vista now that it feels horrible going back to XP, in a lot of ways XP is superior to vista but I just feel that vista is better but find it hard to qualify exactly why.
Aero is brilliant, it may only look like a cosmetic change but when you really think about it it changes the way you perceive a window, I hate it when applications are not "glassed" in at least some way as glassing makes a window less intrusive and makes typically blank visually obtrusive and useless visual elements seem more part of the background and feel more invisible.
Am I ranting?
I also like the icons/layout of vista and I like it even more in 7, people look down their noses sometimes at people who say it looks better, but when you think about it it is the only real way you see what your computer is doing, if it is presented to you in a better way then it's more pleasing.
I will definitely get windows 7 for my laptop, I feel that it will be perfect on there, but for some reason vista seems more powerful... I really can't qualify that with any empirical evidence, I think maybe it's just that a lot of the tweaks make it seem nicer but maybe not really for power users.
For example (and oh god I'm off on one now) multiple windows of the same type, if you group them up in W7 they come up as those little thumbnails, which is fine when you maybe only have 2 or 3 of that type open but sometimes on my desktop I have 6 or 7 open and it takes more visual processing and physical mouse movement to move from one to the other.
Other things like the notification icons coming up in a little window rather than just staying where they were in vista it just seems anti intuitive all of your icons are arranged horizontally but then these extra ones aren't.
I don't really know if i have any kind of conclusion to this post so I'll sign off for now.