Actually, when all those new effects like Aero are turned off, the performance hit is not really noticeable :P I plan to get Vista for my laptop once a service pack comes out (Vista insecurities caused me to use a dual boot partition in my desktop so I can use XP just in case).

accelleron, 2 GB of RAM is still highly recommended for high-end Vista gaming due to the increasingly demanding requirements. I've already seen the benefits of 2 GB in Windows XP (I haven't upgraded my desktop RAM though since the local sale was only on DDR2 notebook RAM). While 1 GB is great in XP, it will just suffice in many cases for Vista.