Win 2000 was awesome, true, but it was a totally different product line, remember? Win2k was an updated version of NT, which was a separate product line from the consumer versions. The poster above is still right - MS has a habit of launching one crap product with a lot of buggy new features, followed by a solid one.
As Win 7 has been the solid one following the crap that was Vista, we have a good chance Win 8 will be the next Win 95 / ME / Vista, while Win 9 will be the one that consumes the market (like 98 / XP / 7).