For me, one of the things that make me stay with MicroSoft is that they have great free dev tools. I've tried a lot of them, and for me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2008. Also, vista is a very young OS, still being fixed. It is much more mature now than one year ago, but surelly it will be best in 2009. Do you remember how crap was XP SP2 when it was released? or even MacOsX in version 10.1, Both were terrible...
Linux requieres even more maintenance than Windows or MacOsx, I've had RedHat, Fedora and Ubuntu, and none of them worked for me 'out of the box'. Lots of hardware problems, incompatibilities between SO libraries, and the like... I don't want to spend most of my time fixing my OS, I prefer spend my time using it. Obviously that applies to Microsoft OS and Mac Os, but linux has always been much more time demanding on maintenance in my experience
Linux requieres even more maintenance than Windows or MacOsx, I've had RedHat, Fedora and Ubuntu, and none of them worked for me 'out of the box'. Lots of hardware problems, incompatibilities between SO libraries, and the like... I don't want to spend most of my time fixing my OS, I prefer spend my time using it. Obviously that applies to Microsoft OS and Mac Os, but linux has always been much more time demanding on maintenance in my experience