IE has come on a lot over years, granted; it's nice to feel relatively assured that CSS and JavaScript developed in Firefox will work in IE 8. However, until such time that it ever becomes pleasant to use, its praises won't get sung. And if IE remains perpetually behind the curve in both standards support and usability, it's going to have a hard job improving its reputation. What you must remember is that anything good in the UI, Firefox got there a long time before, and iCab or Opera probably did before Firefox. So even when Microsoft do get something halfway right, anyone with a clue was using something better long before that. IE doesn't just have to catch up, it has to overtake.
Am I trolling? If I am, then you took the bait very predictably, and again, that says more about you than it does about me. The real deal for me is whether I return from using Vista/7/2008/2008 R2 to XP and think to myself, "self, XP really sucks at <something> where 7 succeeds". 7 lets you drag-rearrange the taskbar and tray icons, but I was doing this in XP long before 7 was released. A program called Everything lets me find any file by name instantly.
The problem with any OS overhaul is that you're always back where you started. 7's Explorer has no commands toolbar and no tasks panel (that I'm aware of) so I can't imagine how anyone non-technical (parents for example) could seriously use it like that; don't ask me why context menus are so hard to understand, but for some reason they are. 7 has no "elevate" command at the command line, and a lot of the UI is reduced to random invocations involving keyboard modifiers, e.g. command-shift-click on taskbar button to open a new instance with elevation.
The new taskbar is a confusing mess because it relies too much on an impossible state: every program being designed properly. You've got programs that can't be pinned because the taskbar can't decide what to invoke to open them, MMC snap-ins that all show up as the same icon so you can't tell one from another, programs that won't elevate with ctrl-shift-click, windows that are still omitted from the taskbar for no reason …
You need a third-party hack to force shares to get their share badge shown on the icon again, and pretty much, 7 is back to collecting a fresh new set of toys to get it to behave sensibly, where with XP I've already gone that and got settled into something that already works pretty much as well as 7 does.
How do limited users install fonts in 7? In XP, you can relax the security on C:\WINDOWS\Fonts so that limited users can install fonts, but in 7, C:\WINDOWS\Fonts is hacked up so badly that it doesn't even have a Security tab in Properties and cacls is also banned from altering permissions. Why can't Windows, by 7, have per-user fonts like the Macintosh?
I don't desire to hate Windows 7, or anything else for that matter; I'm just aware that it has years to go before it's a fully consistent environment, and I'm not swayed by shadows, translucency, pointless animations and other fluff. I was using a Sony VAIO 1920×1080 15.5″ recently, set to 125% DPI, and Microsoft still don't have a clue how to scale graphics. They still don't understand that to scale an 8-bit image, it must be raised to 32-bit first, and there are a lot of problems in their scaling in general that leaves the system looking very rough-edged. Again, in time, high-DPI will be the dream come true that it should be, but right now, it looks like a hack. Another thing is that Windows 7 still retains the shoddy ClearType from XP, and only WPF gets the more advanced version with sub-pixel positioning. This means that in 125% high-DPI mode, fonts that were OK with 1px strokes *still* have 1px strokes, so text looks quite spindly!
I was sure that I'd been told, by people here, that Windows 7 introduced revised ClearType, and wondered why ClearType still sucked on every Windows 7 machine I used. I've since learnt that only WPF gets that, so who knows how many years it will be before all Windows programs move to WPF and finally get smooth text. I guess never, because we'll have 1200 DPI displays long before then and the argument will become moot. Hell, at high DPI even regular antialiasing will be perfectly adequate, no need for ClearType in the first place, which is a win because ClearType is an awful hack really. (The fun phase will be screenshots taken from 300 DPI machines being shown on 100 DPI screens …)