Of course, one of the things about Vista which initially got a lot of complaints was driver support, or lack thereof. And for anything which relies on
third-party drivers which don't get recompiled along with the rest of the OS - i.e., pretty much anything but Linux - there *is* inevitably going to be a
lag between the release of the OS and the release, by those third parties, of updated-to-be-compatible drivers... which means that if Vista had been delayed,
and all of the fixes which went into Win7 had been made in the interim (which itself is somewhat unlikely, as some of them were based on feedback received
about Vista), it still would have had some of the same early problems that Vista had.
Add in how much of the difference is just a matter of people - including, particularly, software vendors - having gotten more comfortable with some of the
concepts and rules introduced in Vista, and therefore having less problem with them in Win7, and I'm not sure how valid the "why didn't they do it
this way to begin with?" actually is...
third-party drivers which don't get recompiled along with the rest of the OS - i.e., pretty much anything but Linux - there *is* inevitably going to be a
lag between the release of the OS and the release, by those third parties, of updated-to-be-compatible drivers... which means that if Vista had been delayed,
and all of the fixes which went into Win7 had been made in the interim (which itself is somewhat unlikely, as some of them were based on feedback received
about Vista), it still would have had some of the same early problems that Vista had.
Add in how much of the difference is just a matter of people - including, particularly, software vendors - having gotten more comfortable with some of the
concepts and rules introduced in Vista, and therefore having less problem with them in Win7, and I'm not sure how valid the "why didn't they do it
this way to begin with?" actually is...