What makes the situation worse is that the laptop manufactures work with Microsoft to include 'Vista only' hardware, making it difficult to get XP running on the machine - my DV6000t is a prime example.
Thank goodness that Ubuntu, SUSE and Fedora all run great (fast, cool and stable) with less configuration than XP takes to get rigged to work on here. Since I am running Ubuntu, and not running the hog that is 'Vista', I have plenty of machine "left over" to run Virtualized XP at lightning fast speeds...
Paint a turd(Vista) gold(fight back ads) all you want, you just have shiny shit at the end of the day...
On a related note: I think it would be interesting to see how many prior Windows-only users were turned to the world of Linux because of Vista being poorly released at a time when the Linux environment was moving towards its current usability and hardware support.