Those aren't reasons to avoid Vista at all costs, those are reasons to evaluate whether Vista is for you or not.

I don't personally have any driver problems with Vista, but then, all my hardware is from bigger scale manufacturers; ASUS, Creative, Logitech etc. All of those drivers are now very mature, and in general, offer more advanced functionality than their XP counterparts (with the exception of Sound drivers because of the audio stack changes).

Vista is generally pretty stable. Most "stability issues" with any Windows isn't caused so much by the OS itself as it is 3rd party software. Ironically, the majority of software problems are because programmers didn't follow the specifications correctly. I ran into this myself with a small network diagnostic utility I had written: an error with multi-threading logic occasionally led to a background thread trying to access the members of the fore ground Form. This didn't cause a problem under XP, but in Vista, it threw an exception (which I didn't handle) causing the program to crash. A quick look in the documentation for the Windows Forms API showed that such an operation was always illegal, just that under Vista, rather than ignoring it, Microsoft decided it should be an exception. Had I followed the API specifications properly, there would have been no problem.

Vista performance is indefensibly lower than XP in some areas, but remarkably better in others. Areas of exceptional improvement include application launch time and overall Windows responsiveness. This is because on one hand Vista leverage's modern hardware capabilities that XP does not, but on the other hand it does a lot more background work to support other "features". I wont defend the fact that a good deal of these features are of no advantage to the end user and may indeed be to their detriment, but that's the trade-off.

Unfortunately, there's now a lot of "tweakware" and amateurish opinion out there about how to optimise Vista, that doesn't help the situation. I don't get exposed to it much these days, but I still get the joy of it now and then. Unfortunately, Vista is in fact far more flexible than XP contrary to what you and many others believe, andTweakware exposes fairly deep level options that are probably not even understood by the programmer themselves, let alone the end user. Advice about "turning off unnecessary services and tasks" is an old standby that can does something somewhere between nothing and an actual performance loss. In cases, software which expects and depends upon a service that has been disabled, or expects system level settings to be within standard ranges, does not have adequate exception handling and crashes inexplicably.

The whole problem is compounded by people issuing edicts about how Vista is just categorically bad. FUD takes hold, and when they're finally pressed into using Vista, they tweak it until it's broken, or fill it full of bad software. And before you think I'm being unduly critical of software, think of this: there are probably billions people in the world who play a sport, millions of them are professionals, but only thousands are international renown. There are fewer programmers of course, but equal proportions of dabblers and experts.

In a few years time, performance issues wont be a concern because hardware will be that much faster. This will mean that people wont feel the need to tweak it up which will improve things. Programmers will be developing on Vista so they can learn all new lazy habits. Nothing much will change, just as nothing much has changed since XP was released, only now the naysayers sing XP's praises. It's a comic little cycle to watch.

In the mean time, I'd council you to be a help, rather than a hindrance.