@Mike Gravgaard

XP is eight years old now.. don't you think Microsoft should be given some leeway on memory, especially as it's dirt cheap? A new build XP box these days needs a mimimum of half a gig to do anything sane, so I don't think Windows 7 needing a gig is that unreasonable.

Whilst I am not entirely happy with what appears to be a tune up of Vista rather than anything significant, Windows 7 is considerably slimmer than Vista. I upgraded a (4GB, 2GHz) laptop to Windows 7. It uses half a gig less memory (1.2GB in use on x64, including integrated graphics memory) than in Vista on startup, and boots faster than the quad core desktop next to it..

It's entirely possible to create your own slipstreamed patch CD, and has been since XP, or use WSUS.

There is package management - that's what the Windows Installer is for. Alternatively if you mean dependency handling and online repositories, that's not really the way Windows works. There shouldn't be anything stopping people using the windows install for that though. I suppose converting something like cygwin to use Windows Installer might make a bit of a mess of it, but other than that where's the deficiency?

Personally I still wouldn't touch VirtualBox with a bargepole, even though I have a soft spot for Innotek who originally developed it. It's far too buggy under multiple Unix OSes as well as Windows. VMWare Server or Virtual Server, OTOH, should be fine and I'm reasonably confident that crashes in those are due to the OS rather than the VM..

As far as bling goes, whilst I agree, it isn't what sells. People like UI bling - it's one of the easiest 'improvements' to see. I'm not seeing an issue even on fairly crap X3100 Intel graphics - in fact it is quite fast, and the improvement over RDP is huge.

I don't know how many versions of Windows 7 there will be, but I'd be prepared to put money on at least three : Home Premium, Business and Ultimate.