"There will be thousands of tonnes of dumped monitors, video cards and whole computers that are perfectly capable of running Vista - except for the fact they lack the paranoid lock down mechanisms Vista forces you to use. That's an offensive cost to the environment.
"Future archaeologists will be able to identify a 'Vista Upgrade Layer' when they go through our landfill sites."
I direct you to:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
This details the copy-denial mechanisms and the costs they will impose on consumers and hardware manufacturers and their probable effects on reliability and performance.
What 'paranoid lock-down mechanisms' are required other than a purchased licensing key? Sounds like the typical uninformed greenie BS.