Vista was more broken because of poor drivers support then anything. While it was more resource intensive then Windows XP and even Windows 7, It was honestly not THAT bad.
I picked it up when SP1(Along with an extra 4 gigs of memory since it was cheap) came out and had no issues aside of Nvidia's bad 8800GTX drivers(9 months later those drivers did get fixed, but that was way too long). Creatives drivers while bad due to removal of features did seem to work ok(Daniel_K driver pack got all my features back).
Windows 8 may be in for trouble because it seems to be against multi-tasking(in metro).If i use the built in PDF reader, it seems to only be able to have ONE pdf open at a time(this is just not good for cross referencing papers). Great Idea for tablets and people that use the computer only for "social" networking, but for real work, its not that good. Having the desktop does help this, but it just does not feel quite right to have to play back and forth with metro to desktop a lot.
Also, would be nice to see some Media Center updates, that could get a metro touch and maybe even benefit from it.
All in all, once you get used to 8, its not ALL bad, but I think it has more bumps then my XP to Vista(truth be told, I did not use xp much if at all after Vista was installed. I kept it, but just never had a need to go back and use it) trip. Windows 8 has me going back to 7 a fair bit for some things(I just find it faster to use. Not faster in speed, but faster to get things done).