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It is quite clear that the author does not like Vista and therefore saying the comparison is not biased is garbage. It is also clear that the author has spent little time with Vista given that the only features they can mention are those that everybody knows about. To be clear I ran XP for years and I'm running Vista now. In some cases it is a good choice, in others it isn't. The author tries to say Vista is a bad idea all around.

Let's cover the things the author conveniently skipped over.

1) BitLocker. If your computer gets stolen the information on it is safe even with an OS reformat. Not available without going to a third-party.
2) Parental controls. I have kids who don't need to be playing certain games or viewing certain web sites. XP's implementation was poor at best and didn't allow for limiting programs. Vista allows me to not only configure controls per user (so my wife can browse CNN without getting prompted for a password) but also control what games each can play. Again, not available without going to a third-party. Sure there is GP but what home user's can do that?
3) RunAs. Please, XP's implementation was half-baked. Unless you set the right options in Explorer you couldn't even start up a different Explorer instance. And then there was the whole command line thing. Sure IT departments might have a tool to do it but shouldn't it work out of the box?
4) Window Switching. You have to admit that the Win3.0 way of tabbing through open windows was pretty poor. If you had more than one instance of an app open you couldn't tell which one you were using.
5) Sidebar. While not critical it is really convenient. Sort of like a tray icon but with more information. Since most people have either multiple monitors or 10 billion pixel resolutions the space doesn't matter that much.
6) Reliability Monitor. A great tool for tracking reliability of your machine to try and find patterns in apps or the OS.
7) ETW. Available for a while but not really accessible until now. This gives IT and technical folks a lot more information on things happening inside Windows and apps.
8) Task Scheduler. The latest version gives you a lot more control over how and when things start and how they handle errors. It also works around issues with Windows Defender and startup apps. More importantly it allows you to run admin tools from non-admin accounts without requiring a password.

There are a lot of things I don't like about Vista. Here's just a small list:
1) Slow. Hopefully post-SP1 fixes will resolve this. I have the fastest PC you can buy and it takes forever to start up.
2) Drivers. Poor driver support. This is partially MS'es fault and partly third-party. Still XP and all other OS releases go through the same thing.
3) Services. There are way too many services that run by default. Why exactly do I need a service to support the F1 key? Why do I need a service for communicating with wMP when I don't even have an MP3 player? Why do I need a MCE service when I don't use Media Center? How about the various versions of audio support, performance enhancement and networking components? Too many services => bloat and performance issues.
4) DirectSound. MS removed direct hardward support. While I agree with the idea I think it came too quickly as most games will simply fail because of it. Makes your $300 sound card behave like a $10 one. Fortunately companies like Creative have Alchemy or OpenAL to resolve the issue.
5) Memory. Vista is bloated and it wears out the HDD while running. MS needs to fix this and adding new features isn't it. I think the OS still needs to go through another feature-cut phase to remove features that not everybody needs, or at least expose simplified controls to do it. Something like how W2K3 works would be good.

So is Vista the right choice for everyone? No. For IT groups, maybe. For devs and techies, probably. For home users with kids and newer games, yes. For novices and those who want to play Where is Carmen Sandiego, no.