I'm a software engineer by trade and when I joined my current company they bought me a HP laptop which had Vista. Because I run a slightly more complicated environment than most people, I found I was having to re-load Vista once a month! I eventally got bored and down-graded to XP.
I have since moved to Mac and, despite a number of frustrations, I have been more than happy.
I've got Windows 7 on a couple of my machines here, and it seems to be better than Vista, although I'm not really pushing it. It will be interesting to see how it does when it's set free in the wild!
Sorry to hear you lost the grail, hopefully you'll find another one, cheaper and in better condition soon.