You are ignorant, MSDN is not bending over for vista it is so I can get free XP, free Vista, any microsoft OS free, infanant amount of serial keys, Free Visual Studio, among many other goodies. Many people use this service so I dn't know why you are even speaking like it is a bad deal.
To further prove you are ignorant everything is patched even Linux is patched on a daily/weekely baisis.
To again prove you are ignorant Vista is not based on XP pal it's based on Server 2003 SP1. I personally think it will be $300 but I'd love to see a $200 price tag.
Your ignorance goes above all in this one. Yes it does no more clicky with WinFS. Search for what you want just like you were googling your own PC. If you want to be left behind be my guest.
don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing you totally, I'd be curious to know how you cna make these jugdments though when you never used it. And as always you can go in windows components and unistall the apps you don't want and heck every OS does this.