CNET's Michael Horowitz links back to my showcase, A Look at Windows XP Service Pack 3, Part 1: Good Enough? and makes an interesting point:
Again I agree [with the assertion that XP is comfortable and familiar]. Some people don't have the time or the interest to learn a new user interface. Vista should have had an option to make it look just like XP.
Actually, that would have been quite welcome. But I'm guessing Microsoft declined to go down this route or a few reasons, the most important of which is that so many users would have probably chosen it over the Vista UI. (That and the support costs, I guess. ) There's no reason why Vista Basic couldn't look just like XP.
I'll be finishing Part 2 of article that soon (along with an SP3 slipstreaming guide). If you had told me a year ago that I'd be writing this much about XP now I'd have never believed it.