No one is forcing you to upgrade. And it's not like there's a must have AAA Dx10 only title out there.
People buy Vista because its a good OS. There's no performance issue either if you don't run it on a 7 year old machine.
Actually they are forcing you to upgrade to Vista. I was recently looking at buying a laptop and every single one I looked at came with a Vista variant installed on it by default. Actually, I tell a lie, one laptop had an "upgrade to XP" option for an extra £20
