this isn't a wtf, this is your own snobbishness and prebuilt opinion that vista was going to suck. I have a 3 year old laptop and i have had the final version of vista on it since the day it got posted to msdn. I have had no problems with it other than a couple drivers for things i dont use anyways that will be fixed when Vista is actually publicly released at the end of this month. Visual Studio works great without a single problem so far.
User Account Control can be turned off, and if Microsoft hadn't included it, then people like you would be here bitching about how its a wtf that vista didnt have any kind of protection and any program could do whatever it wanted.
And instead of actually taking more than five minutes to learn how to actually use vista, you ran onto here and started bitching. You should save everybody the cliche complaints and switch to java. Then you could work on a mac. Haha.