I use Vista 64-bit, and to overcome the legacy and driver annoyances, I simply installed VMWare and XP 32-bit.  Going forward, it seems to me that VMs solve a lot of problems.  VMWare lets me connect my old HP scanner, for which no Vista driver exists, and DVD43 does its thing (with just one small glitch).

If VM did a better job with DirectX display elements, they could be broadly useful.

I am intrigued by Server 2008, mostly because of Hyper-V.  I now think workstations should have VMs, as a built-in element.