Isnt it a bit dumb considering much of cutting edge 3d stuff for games, movies, scientific simulations etc is designed around openGL first, as its most portable and may encourage people to take more serious R&D onto other platforms?
Not really, I don't think. OpenGL has always been a niche API. It's popular among indies, but rarely used by professional game development studios. It's quite popular in scientific and 3d rendering applications, but those are such high end stuff that they don't have to worry about customer support. I mean you're not going to spend $10k on Houdini and throw it away because you can't be bothered to download drivers, are you? But you sure might download a game demo and uninstall it because it doesn't work out of the box.
I think the simple truth is that OpenGL drivers aren't better because they're not important enough to the average person. If bad OpenGL support was costing ATI or Intel enough money, you can bet your ass they'd be doing more. Microsoft have no great love for OpenGL, but then they never did, nor did they need to. Nope, I think you can safely blame the patchy OpenGL support in Vista on poor driver support. ( And BTW is it just me or have AMD/ATI just gone into self-destruct mode lately? They can't seem to do anything right. )