I haven't had to reinstall Windows since upgrading to 7, and didn't really reinstall that often with XP either. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think this has been a big issue in quite a while.
I had a problematic driver state, where hibernate stoppped working. I put up with it for more than a year. Then I bothered to reinstall win 7. And I am amazed at how useful hibernate actually is in my day to day life! Also pressing the touchpanel and deactivating the wifi module use to kill the machine :|
I still have a 6 year old Vista partition from when it first launched somewhere (which has since been updated with SP2 ofc).
I have written off ever trying to make that drive look pretty again without breaking everything, but it does still boot and I think all the applications start. Baby steps M$!
I blame Dell for this issue though, not win7.