Vista users, how is it?

I'm sure some of you are already using Vista, so I wanted to know,  how is it?  Is it worth it right now, or should I wait for the bugs to be worked out?

It'd be fair to say Avalon (probably responsible for the majority of extra RAM usage in Vista) is another way Vista more efficiently uses the RAM as cache.
Only it's a cache of useless trash, instead of my useful data.

for many users the performance difference of having 300mb instead of 500mb free on an idle system is not going to be particularly noticeable.
Not for anyone doing anything serious. And if you're not doing anything serious, you could be off with 512 MB RAM, which falls incredibly short for the Vista monster.

I mean free in the sense that OS X provides lots of frameworks for "free".
I'd rather pay for what I need, not for what Microsoft or Apple think I need. You don't buy your house fully equipped and decorated, do you?

using standard system databases that offer the advantage of being ubiquitous
Ubiquitous to Microsoft software. As if third party software didn't exist.

What are you talking about? You haven't said why I'm wrong, and from my perspective it seems like your opinions of Vista's memory usage and featureset haven't been inspired by actually using the OS as I have.
I tried a Windows Vista beta on a spare machine for laughs and shits. I laughed hard, but then got quickly annoyed at its stupidity and bloat, then I realized malware was not meant to be fun or useful, so I hard resetted it and blanked the disk to avoid possible side effects of Vista's malware.

Avalon and a proper indexed search - are hard to dismiss as entirely a waste.
Yes, it's a waste because it's full of stupid features for simple-minded users, 10% of which can be used in a productive environment for real, efficient work or even real, efficient entertainment (games, media, etc.). All they needed to do is to provide a decent command line interface and a decent system API and UI toolkit, and look at what they got. Bullshit bloatware full of non-functional crap, transparency, chrome, etc. And they expect me to classfy my (currently) 275000 files in my data-only volume by means of stupid clicks and drags?

Besides, who here isn't running with 1gb of RAM or more on their main system?
You said it yourself: main system. Other systems don't have to have that much RAM, and Vista is useless for them. And do you know why I equipped my main system with 1 GB of RAM and soon to be 2 GB? I didn't do it because I read on EasyPC magazine that it's what the cool dudes do. I did it because I needed it. And if I needed it, Vista wasting one third of it will render a previously useful, fit machine useless for what I want to do.