Vista wasn't garbage. In fact, Vista and 7 precisely parallel Leopard and Snow Leopard both in timelines and in release quality—a somewhat rushed, haphazard release of a new OS with tons of new features, many of which were considerably more resource-intensive than the previous release. 7 was more or less Vista SP3. The design language didn't even change except the Start bar.

People had bad experiences on Vista because they tried to run Windows Aero on 2001 hardware, and hardware vendors for once strong-armed MS into certifying their half-decade-old hardware as 'ready for Vista'.