The high end gear is something generally seen in the corporate world as opposed to the home user who commonly looks in many cases at the best performance value for gaming, multimedia, and other home applications. Even at this time you can still find older network configurations likely seeing Fat16 as well as NT based logons to networks while office machines are prune to see more frequent upgrades there.

As you know those are maintained by IT pros whether staffed or externally hired to come in for things like that. But the same could be said for non MS OSs(without talking about any names of a certain fruit that hangs from trees. ) that still see applications in academic area there.

For Vista the advantages seen for the home user over XP wasn't the "bloatware" complaint for those running older hardwares but the much needed improvement in security. But that turned out to be a rather intrusive UAC now corrected in 7 as well as other items. Vista also saw a much needed IE 7 over the imfamous flaws and vulnerabilities seen with IE 6. IE 8 goes even further actually flagging trojan sites with a new threat warning even without an antivirus, antimalware, or IE security(3rd party) process inplace.

General improvements in accessibility for 7 outweighs anything seen in previous versions for the typical novice user! Try waving your hands in front of the display(monitor, projection screen, tv) and actually moving multiple window and other items. Examine "Windows touch" http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...aspx?vindex=10

"Device Stage" Windows 7 Beta videos

And the one other thing not seen in previous versions, what's that? A listening ear to what the average consumer would like to see in Windows. Windows 7 Beta videos

The last thing of course is more support being realized for the 64bit arena!