Wow so much to comment on where to start. First i'll just say this is fun to comment, nobody will take anything said by somone who starts with "Oh, don’t get me wrong, I am sure that the ultimate product (which will arrive shortly after Vista, no doubt) will suck in both new and fascinating ways" as serious journalism. So since the writer has already discredited himself I'll just leave his rubbish article alone and move onto some of the other peoples comments.
"Exchange: Exchange is under threat from Linux-based mail applications which are appearing in small and mid-sized companies in significant numbers. Each new version of Exchange is bigger, more complex and harder to install. While very large organisations can handle this, many mid-sized companies are baulking at the complexity and cost involved. A linux mail server is much simpler and cheaper. I suspect that MS will lose significant market share in the SME space over the next few years - firstly because organisations will just decide not to upgrade, and then because when the eventually have to do so, they will move to a pre-packaged solution based on Linux." - This could be the biggest joke of a statement I've ever heard. Could you please back up your statements with some link to proof. Anyone can say, gee lots of people are moving off, where are your numbers to back this statement up and could you please name one of these pre-packaged solutions on Linux.
So lets just go the xbox path for a moment. To make a statment like "gaming systems (when you loose over $1 billion dollars selling your product, it is a failure)" clearly shows a lack of understanding of the game business. All companies lose money on the unit it's a loss, you make it on game licensing. Sony lost a ton on the playstation 2, let me guess that was a failure as well.
Wow, I'm shocked you didn't do some research on this before making statements like "If Apple can accomplish these things with hardware that is obsolete, why then does Microsoft recomend users buy computers that haven’t even been made yet?" You should do some rudamentary searching on the web about the environment.
For one Apple does it by using tricks such as alpha blending on a 2D plane to determine the way a screen should be drawn. So for instance when something is behind something else it computes the way it should look and draws that. Basically like a giant bitmap that gets updated as things move. The Vista Aero environment is a directx enabled environment much like inside a game engine, think doom 3 for your UI. This allows for minor things like translucence and glow but much greater things that many 3rd party developers could do. Imagine your computer being represented by any icon with specular lighting while rotating and casting real world shadows over the other icons. This can be done with little coding. Why would you do that (I'm sure we'll find out when 3rd party developers start releasing alternate UI's), not sure but the point is if you looked a little deeper you might have seen that what apple does to display "eye candy" and what is actually going on under the hood of the aero UI are totally different and thus the high horsepower necessary to run it. That also BTW would have answered the article title which you didn't do.
Is Microsoft Trying to Morph into Apple?
Why Is Vista So Resource Hungry?