Microsoft is already working on Windows 7, formerly known as Blackcomb or Vienna, and is scheduled to release early 2010.
I run Windows Vista and OSX, and personally, haven't had any problems with Vista... Given, it might be a little more annoying for the savvy user, but I disabled/removed all those features. I previously blogged about how slow copying files could be (and a workaround).
PCWorld published a silly article about hardware requirements for an OS to be released 2-3 years from now; well, obviously, your current PC is not ready, simple answer. When XP came out, it required a decent PC, so did Vista, and in fact, so did Tiger, Leopard, Ubuntu, or anything else. Companies design OSs to fully utilize potentials of processing power and memory, it would be silly if they didn't.
In summary, if I worked for Microsoft's PR department I would try to keep any articles of a new operating system down in the low. There's a lot of clean-up work to do prior to anyone accepting new releases from M$.
On a positive note, one feature I did find interesting is the realization of tendencies towards virtualization. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V already showed Microsoft's understanding of market trends, and now with Windows 7 support for VHD (Virtual Hard Drives) they extend the power to the user.
