Pretty similar experience. I bought a new laptop that came with Vista already installed. Having read all the bad stuff about Vista I have two copies of XP sitting here, one unopened.
I figured I would putter around with Vista a little and then install XP. But after reading about all the fun trying to find XP drivers for the video card that came with my new laptop, I never got round to installing XP.
Some 6 months later I am still using Vista. It has crashed perhaps twice in 6 months, far less than XP used to. I did have to spend perhaps 2 hours "setting up" Vista, mostly turning off a lot of the stuff that is supposed to make it user friendly but is in fact annoying. The performance is fine, especially after turning off a lot of the crap.
As a highlight, Vista runs several older games right out of the box that never worked on XP, or only worked with lots of "fixes". The original Steel Beasts is the only game I have tried to run on Vista that just didn't work.