Hate is a strong word.

You can turn off Aero and go back to the XP "old" theme and it will pretty much look and feel just like XP, except for all the new underpinnings etc.

I found Vista to be piggish though I understand the reason why it uses RAM the way it does etc. It just at the moment doesn't offer a compelling reason to move to it. Eventually we will all be running it or OSX or some Linux distro, but since XP is supported till 2014, I'll sit tight.