Windows 7 is previous to Vista and has had even more time spent on it than Vista (which began dev even before XP was released). Then they took some of the features planned for Windows 7 and built them into Vista. I never really heard much about Vista pre-releasing except when it was codenamed "Longhorn", but I have heard lots about Windows 7 from a friend who got into MS. They've been taking lots of feedback from Vista into Windows 7, and improving on what they had before even. The GUI has changed something like 20x, and I guess Ballmer wanted it to have the same feel as Vista upon release, so you get a lot of the current Vista crap in there. His company, so goes his way sadly. I've switched between *nix and Windows for a while now, but a Vista built laptop w/ XP on it has been my fav so far. Though I will give Windows 7 a good thurough play once it is released.