Good for you, I'm never gonna get convinced.

I both agree and disagree with that statement.

Windows finally got animations and transparency when Mac OS has beaten it by 6 years. Truly an oomph moment.

I sort of agree with you, but not in the way I think you meant it.

Vista's problem was that it's hardware requirements were too high for it's time. Operating systems have very long project development lifecycle and at a point early on they did a forward looking estimate of where the PC market would be by the time Vista released, and they overshot. When it was almost ready to release it to the world Microsoft put out the initial minimum and recommended specs and PC sellers (Dell, HP, Gateway) lobbied them to lower the numbers; the cost of a PC that met the recommended specs was just too high for the existing PC market and it would kill their sales numbers if they started selling PCs that met those figures. Microsoft complied and lowered the specs, but didn't actually change the operating system in any meaningful way - they just changed a few numbers on a piece of paper and added some configurations that let you disable some of the more hardware intensive bits. The result was that most Vista users were running it on hardware that wasn't actually able to run it properly, which lead to horrible user experiences. Anyone that bought a high end PC or built one themselves and ran Vista on that, however, seemed quite happy with the operating system.

Very similar story here: I bought a new computer that shipped with Vista.

I got horrendously tired of that Pentium 4 thing.

I don't really like XP's design anymore. I didn't like it back then either.

Ah maan, why'd you have to tell me that, it still feels like it came out just 3-4 years ago tops

True but it's when Microsoft started to implement apps and such for tablets and hybrid laptops along with office 365.