It is bothersome that the nation's number one operating system maker is having such a long and rough time introducing an operating system that should have been out two years ago...and when it does get THROWN onto the market, as MS always does, it will be very buggy, with its share of compatibility problems...deja vu XP. So what is MS doing for a living these days? They are still selling alot of copies of XP and Office and some games, and when you have over 80% of the market share, who cares, right??
When the nations' "leader" is the OS market cannot deliver a system that is even equal to MAC OSX in terms of technical content and stability, you have to wonder a bit. So I would not let the shortcomings of the Vista beta haunt you -- it will haunt its buyers for some time to come, after 2007, IMHO.