Though the release of Vista is testing everyone's patience - the more I read and work with the product I feel when it finally arrives it will be worth the wait. Many of the pain points in Windows XP (in general Windows) that we have got used to and learned to live with, are addressed in Vista.
Take for example the "scheduled tasks" applet that ships with Explorer - though for a client it may be just enough, it falls severely short in terms of features when it comes to enterprise deployments and in a server setup.
The new task scheduler allows you to have a rich set of triggers - my favourite is the ability to right-click on a entry in event viewer and assign a task to it. Sounds simple but this is a powerful feature from a IT Pro perspective. The action that can be performed for a task include the ability to email directly, have multiple actions for one tasks and more. The best news is that all the features exposed in the UI is also made available through command-line tool schtasks.exe.
For a more detailed article on Vista Task Scheduler read this Technet article.