There is more to it than "it just looks different" or it just feels different.
There is the usability factor, and by that I mean not only the usability of the OS itself in the hands of the end user, but also the usability of the hardware you already have for the new OS.
I have been around long enough to have made a transition from MS-DOS (well, Tandy MS-DOS lol) 2.11 to Windows 7. There are many who have been around longer (I can't really count my first computer, as it was a TI 99-4/A, which saved data to Cassette, and ran off of cartridges) but the fact remains that many people get set in their ways and want things to stay the same. Many people running XP were also running machines that were 4 even 5 years old, and although they might have upgraded components here and there, it was still basically a low end machine.
Then there come the niches - the gamers, the hardcore programmers, the bloggers, the social-network addicts, etc. - they have very specific machine needs in mind, and for them, unless they are in the market for a new machine, Vista was simply not priced right. Gamers split into two camps - those that acknowledged that Dx10 was better overall than Dx9 and those that still harped that Games performed better when running XP versus Vista (which will be true forever and ever for the most part if you run XP and Vista on the exact same machine - which is not fair - Vista is the newer, younger brother, and in and of itself is a lot larger in terms of lines of code than XP, thereby meaning it uses more resources. It's bound to be true that you'll need a machine that can keep up with Vista's demands, your 1999 Compaq Armada 1500C laptop or equivalent desktop (I suppose the tail end of the PIII era if the 366 Celeron base laptop was a mid range laptop then) just simple won't keep up with an OS released a full7+ years later. And yet, I can say from testing XP that XP did not run as well on older hardware (for its time) than Vista did when I was testing it.
I tested XP on a Pentium 200 machine with 96 MB RAM. That was achingly slow. Then after XP came out, I built a decent machine (for its time) around it - a P4 2.0(A) GHz (Northwood) CPU on a Tyan Trinity 510 motherboard with 1 GB of RAM. Started in Jan of '02 and finished the complete build in May of '02. It worked for a while - that same machine got upgraded many times, with a different CPU, then different mobo, different video card, different HDs more times than I could count, all leading up to testing Vista on a 3.2(E) (Prescott) CPU w/ HT on an MSI Neo-2 Platinum Edition mobo with 1 GB RAM. After Vista went RTM I went to 3 GB of RAM, and was loving Vista. Then I built the BeastIV in April, and I am already planning on upgrading the CPU, mobo an RAM within a few months.
The point of all this diatribe is that it is not just a resistance to change in a generalized way but it is a very specific need to keep working on a machine that has been true for a couple of years now. It's a bit of nostalgia, a bit of economics, and a bit of rebelliousness.
The only problem I have is that these days I hear idiots left and right complaining about things they have never even tried. Even if Vista isn't as speedy as XP on the same identical machine, with Vista native UAC, I can avoid having to run 4 or 5 layers of protection in the way of AV, anti-spyware, and other such nonsense. I guarantee if you put a well protected Vista machine (maybe 3 apps total) and a well protected XP machine (probably no less than 9 pieces of software, with at least 3 of those resident 24/7) you'll see XP is not nearly as fast as it seems to be. Nor it is nearly as forgiving as Vista is.
Case in point - in XP when I tried to enable SLI, I have to reboot. WTF?!? In Vista, it temporarily kills the VDDM, enables SLI, and enables the VDDM - a process that takes no longer than 15 seconds. XP may have been fast, but no one ever got a 15 second turnaround from a reboot. 30, maybe, 45 more likely, but 15? Feh.
Vista is a more intelligent OS, but you need horsepower to use it. There are a number of reasons not to use it - but the worst of the complainers and naysayers are those that continually say the current thing is the best. One noted 'writer' was busted by good old Ed Bott over at ZDNet because not only did he scathingly denounce Vista as a legitimate OS and extolling the virtues of XP, he tailored his piece to run very, very similar to his piece about 7 years previous - denouncing XP.
Same man, same (almost) words, same BS. And the worst part is that these days that man has a larger following than he did back then - so even *more* idiots will point their fingers and cry in fear thinking that Vista is just bad.
