I'll be looking seriously at this question when XP finally becomes outdated for me, which I reckon will happen within 1-3 years. Vista as it stands now has little or no interest to me so either I upgrade to whatever comes after Vista (already supposedly coming in 2009!), or I go for OSX, possibly running it on non-Mac hardware.
It's sad though because Vista *used* to hold so much promise IMO (back when it was "Longhorn"). I mean it promised to do things even OS X wasn't doing or possibly even thinking about doing yet. Of greatest interest to me was WinFS, the "database filesystem", which seemed tremendously interesting and potentially useful to me. Since that was scrapped and so many other things were as well I lost interest. Meanwhile OS X has continued to advance, not necessarily in ways that interest me as much, but it definitely has some great features that Windows just doesn't have (*natively*). Fortunately the Windows side of things has sooo much software that can do just about anything you can do on a Mac and then some (a lot more in fact). So it's not an easy decision. Hence, as I said, waiting until I *have* to choose and seeing what the playing field looks like at that time.
I'm pleased however to see that since Apple made the switch to Intel CPU's their price point has actually been rather competitive. In fact when the last round of MacPro's came out they were about the cheapest you could get a system with that level of hardware. The problem has always been that it's nearly impossible to cut corners (reasonably) with Mac hardware. The Mac Mini was a sort of compromise and I do hope they continue with that line as they upgrade the hardware line - it was cheap and you could get it kind of "bare bones", which is what I want. The MacPro's are awesome but they have a bottom-line price that is higher than I'm generally willing to spend. For comparison's sake my roommate just bought an almost entirely new Core 2 Duo E6600 system, 2GB of RAM, a Geforce 8800GTS, new case, etc. and only spent just under $1400 *after* California 8.25% tax *and* shipping. The MacPro *starts* at over $2000. Now granted that's with *two* dual core CPU's (4 cores total) and the E6600 only has 2 total, but the point is that if I only want dual core I have to go for a fricking iMac or a Mac Mini. They could have had the MacPro price point way lower if they'd (and thus more attractive and having a wider market) if they'd offered a single CPU model (dual socket motherboards are always much more expensive). So while the hardware is a good value for what you get, the problem remains that they don't offer the options I want at the price I want, while the PC side offers billions of options.
I could go on forever back and forth on this stuff. The bottom line is I'll be waiting and continuing to use XP until I really have to change and I recommend others do the same as Vista just doesn't seem to be much of an upgrade while carrying still much higher system requirements and bloat.
- Oshyan