By a long way, yes. I wouldn't ever want to go back to XP.
Also, remember that SP1 for Vista is due in the very near future, which is supposed to get rid of all the file transfer issues.
All the reasons you have listed for not liking the OS are nothing to do with the OS itself (bar file transfer which is due to be fixed iminently) and are actually issues with third parties not being able to code for Vista (ATITool, video drivers, etc etc).
From "Joe Public's " point of view, Vista is much MUCH better than XP, you are the one not seeing it from their point of view, you're seeing it from an enthusiastic gamers POV, which, in the grand scheme of things, is a VERY small market segment.
Business/Corporate users are the biggest market segment, followed by general home usage (web browsing/multimedia/word processing), and for this task alone Vista is ultimately fantastic, won't crash, and as a result of its clever prefetching, is actually quicker than XP many times over.
As I said earlier in the thread, give Vista 6 months for drivers to mature, SP1 to come out, and game dev's to actually release games specifically for Vista (there are only a handfull at the moment), and I guarentee that things will get a lot better.