I'd say Nvidia cards are better at the moment! They're inferior in any performance/cost chart, but at least their drivers are working. Yeah they have caused a lot of crashes in vista before sp1, but then again, almost everyone running vista in the first 6-8 months had an nvidia card....
Anyhow, I currently have an ati hd4870 as my 8800gtx failed (memory cooling issues), and I sincerely regret not going for a 260 instead! Sure it's fast, but I hate the drivers. I have to disable my tv in order to play at my native resolution in games, I need to force tv detection, I need to reset the catalyst settings now and then, and sapphire still hasn't replied my support inquiry because of the excessive noise it makes a minute after booting. Sure it is faster than nvidia if factoring in cost, but I'd really rather have a card that 'just works' for the next 2 years, than one that works for the next 5 if you have the time to fiddle with settings.
And that doesn't even account for the raid issues that surfaced when I replaced the nvidia card.
Anyhow, this is as irrelevant to the actual article as any of the other posts, short of the blake one.
ps "meanwhile ATI's drivers were running fine on Vista... " I had the exact opposite experience. Just like in the old days, the ati drivers are inferior. The auto-overclock feature's cool though.