I am a sys admin at work and we set this up on a few machines just to have fun with it.
It is quirky but on a tablet but it is somewhat entertaining.
You can get rid of all the crap by treaking it but it just turns into a glossy 7 from appearances. It is a fun toy but I have to agree that it is just that right now. It is only a shadow of what is supposed to be released in late 2012. And it does not need a higher spec. It is following 7 in actually needing less mem and CPU time. We installed it on a early p4 with 2g of ram and it ran just fine.
Vista was not a bad OS. It had a bad rep but it worked well after SP1. I thought it was fine. I actually use a vista based PE that I slipped a bunch of drivers into for imagine and other stuff at work almost daily.
Both 7 and Vista are much much much much better then XP. Sorry guys, dated OS is dated.