What driver did it install for your video card? One from the CD or one from nvidia's site? If it auto-fetched and installed an nvidia driver straight from nvidia's site, I might be impressed. (I might be impressed, if not for the fact that Gentoo does it and has done it for 5 years.)

How's the command line? First I heard they were making a new shell that's a .NET-style rip-off of bash, and then I heard it wouldn't be ready for Vista, and then I stopped caring. What comes with Vista? CMD.EXE?

Can it run an SSH server out of the box like OS X / Linux? FTP server? IMAP? SMTP?

Can it see any partitions in any format other than NTFS and FAT? reiserfs or ext3 perhaps?

Does it support multiple desktops / workspaces yet? Any system without those is crippled.

I'll never pay for Vista, I know that much. Aside from eye candy, is there any reason anyone should care about it? You haven't really mentioned any. (EDIT: I guess DX10 is kind of a reason if you care about such things.)