Oddly enough a number of good Windows features showed up first in Vista. I think people just weren't ready for the barrage of security permission dialogs and having their printer drivers broken. ;-)
A lot of Vista's issues were driver quality-- Creative Labs and NVIDIA played chicken with Microsoft over the "no more kernel drivers" decision and it took a lot of time for the post-XP drivers to get even remotely good. Creative Labs never did get caught up-- they decided to just do the bare minimum necessary.