Vista Vs Xp

I had bought my computer in 2006, in the month of June. There was Windows Xp preinstalled in the system. Still, the person at the shop asked me whether I would like to have Windows Vista. Vista had launched a few months ago when I had bought my computer. I simply told him that I would not be able to afford that. Hearing this he started laughing out loud. He told me,'Hello mister! Who is asking you to buy it? It is all pirated copy available here.' I was very much shocked to hear this as I had heard and read in many of the reviews that it would not be possible for anybody to copy Windows Vista's DVD. Just after recovering from the shock I asked him about how he did it. But I got a plain answer,'Boy! That's a secret.' After this I simply asked him to suggest what I should keep in my machine as OS. He flatly gave hands for Xp. For the reason part he told that it was a new thing and I should not go for it untill I get some good response from others. And I followed his advise, just like that. Also he had strong points to oppose vista, for example; many of the softwares were not supported by Vista at that time.
Okay! That was the story of yesterday. I had an impression that Vista would rock and I, as a dumb would always regret refusing Vista (pirated isn't a matter). And here comes the twist. I got to talk to one of my friends, luckily he 'had' Vista but now he has downgraded to Xp. The reason was the same, it doesn't allow to run some of the pirated softwares. Yeah! It is also true that his copy of Vista was pirated too. I have also seen haapy people with Vista, those who have got a legal copy of it. But when it comes to the majority I see Vista haters everywhere. Hey! I don't use either Xp or Vista, I am right now on UBUNTU and I am acting neutral in this war. Mind it!
Here is a report by one of the top technology magazines:
'Microsoft is trying hard to get people to fall in love with Vista. Despite Vista being far superior to Xp in terms of security, a third of Vista users downgrade to Xp according to research firm's CTO Craig Barth in collaboration with InfoWorld. They surveyed more than 3000 computers shipped in the last six months and came to this conclusion. Sometimes, the downgrade was done by the customers once they purcahsed their computers, but there were instances were vendors such as Dell downgraded their systems based on request from their customers. Perhaps the most demeaning thing about the whole issue is that a lot of people are not looking at this as a downgrade at all. In their opinion, replacing Vista with Xp is actually an Upgrade! The deep penetration of Xp in the corporate environment is the reason for this. It looks like Microsoft's $300 million advertising campaign to boost Vista sales isn't helping.'
Hey! What's your take on this? Do you agree with this.
Personally I was very much annoyed with both the OSes, so I wouldn't give a personal comment. And that's the reason I am using a linux distro Ubuntu, despite my Windows partition crashed. If I would not have been that so annoyed I would have reinstalled Windows till now.
What do you say?