Also, Vista wasn't crap. Microsoft lowered the system requirements to appease intel and their OEMs. So no surprise it runs like crap on a 4 year old laptop. 2 years later when 7 came out everyone had 2 year newer laptops 7 looks great.
You can see the same with with corporate IT departments: many of them decided not to upgrade to Vista. Why bother when Vista has marginal improvements with lots of bugs? Instead they stuck with the rock solid XP and waited until Microsoft (and the vendors) fixed things (Win7).
I expect corporate IT will view Windows 8 the same way: Metro is a big headache they'll want to avoid. They aren't going to be deploying Metro apps (at least not at first) and they'd probably disable Metro to avoid confusing users. If Microsoft is hoping to make Win8 the corporate standard, they'll have to do it via tablets. Presumably if everyone is using Win8 tablets, they'll eventually want Win8 on their desktop/laptop. Otherwise, I'd expect many IT departs to skip 8 and wait for 9.