Vista was fine. They just made the shift then to signed drivers, so anyone with old hardware was fucked. Windows 7 was no better, really; it had just been long enough that most people were using hardware with signed drivers by then, or were willing to accept that the "old thing" didn't work anymore, so the perception was that it just worked.

Granted, Vista had bad default theming, so 7 looked better (by default). That probably plays a lot into the hate for Vista, too.

(iirc)