Not if you had limited RAM. Less than 4GB was unusable.

It was a performance and memory hog, which wasn't helped by Microsoft underselling its minimal hardware requirements to an extreme. I still have a laptop from that time lying around with a Vista Capable label, Aero never worked on it and it ended up stuck in an eternal update loop because the hard drive did not have enough space for an up to date Vista.

Microsoft had to extend the life of Windows XP one last time when Netbooks became more common because Vista barely ran on a high end laptop.

by the end of its life it was fine, but it took waaaayyy too long to come out, the 64bit support was ahead of its time with no alternative, it was buggy, new access control model was too restrictive (bombarding users with escalation prompts for mundane things), and a bunch of other things that the sands of time caused me to forget.

it was not a great launch. usuable by the end.

Vista SP1 was fine. Vista before that wasn't, really.