The concensus is that corporate adoption will be slow. System requirements are higher than XP, but that's mostly related to the eye candy. Turn that off and it's not that much worse. Beta testers have reported performance problems, but I have to believe Microsoft will address those before releasing anything. The features I find most attractive:

1. Supposedly it looks alot better than XP. A well-done Linux desktop looks a hell of a lot better than XP; maybe this will narrow the gap.

2. Re-written TCP/IP stack. IF the new code isn't full of bugs, which I admit is a possibility, then it should offer better performance. The home user won't notice this much, but it will affect Windows server performance.

3. DirectX 10 is supposed to be cool. I'm not sure whether it's limited to Vista or not- they may also release it for XP.

4. Supposedly it's alot easier in Vista to operate as a non-Administrator. And afaik that's the default. So, theoretically, that limits Grandma's ability to hose up her system quite as badly.

5. From what I've read, they made it so graphics drivers (and possibly others) don't run in kernel land. That means your graphics driver could crash without taking down the OS. That's a good thing. Again, it's of limited use to home users, but it's attractive to people who run Windows servers in that it removes one possible reason for a system crash.

6. Re-written memory management. Same caveat as with the TCP/IP stack. IF it's not buggy, then it should offer increased performance and security. They do some new techniques with loading system files into different sections of memory in order to make it difficult for those seeking to exploit the system w/ buffer overruns.

7. If there's a 64-bit version of Vista, which I think there is, then hopefully it'll get more/better driver support than the 64-bit version of XP.