Truly, sorry to hear about your story with the MBP.
I too ran into similar problems with my MBP experience.
I first bought one in late November of last year when the C2D versions came out. The FIRST MBP I had (within a month of use), the latch broke on it, the one that kept the lid closed, so it was replaced with another MBP.
This SECOND one, its fan broke and essentially fried the motherboard (according the Apple genius). So it too was replaced.
The THIRD one was great for about 2 weeks, then out of nowhere 4 dead pixels appeared in the middle of the screen!

The Apple store refused to exchange it again, since they already did with 2 others and according to their policy 4 dead pixels wasn't enough for an exchange.
So, I sold that THIRD MBP on Ebay, got some cash out of it and being fed up with Apple, went and bought a Sony lappy. WORST MISTAKE I MADE.
The Sony lappy hardware-wise was fine, not great (the battery slid around in its place), but it was fine. But Vista was just horrendous. Nothing worked as it should. I had so many errors and trouble trying to get software like InDesign, Photoshop, etc to work. And so much trouble using it in class (college), going from one wireless network (at home) to my school's was a pain in the ass, it would always require me to reboot, it was odd. And all the random errors from using the pre-installed software was ridiculous. I can make list of all the errors I got with Vista, but there's not enough room on the internet for that.
So, I returned the Sony and bought my FOURTH MBP and this one I love. I know the keys don't align quite right, and the lid on the bottom covering the RAM sticks out a bit, but I'm willing to live with these flaws over living with error after error with Vista.
OS X truly just works, plain and simple.
PS The Sony laptop's battery life was 1.5 hours. My MBP is almost 4 hours, even your 3.5 hours MBP was better and is better than most other PC 15 incher lappies.