As I said in an earlier topic, windows OSes are always poorly supported and crappy when they first come out. But you're going to have to get it eventually, as soon it will become the norm.
yes XP is faster than vista but windows 2000 was faster than XP. If you put a brand new OS on a brand new system it will be faster than an old OS on an old System. If you put a brand new OS on an old system you're shit out of luck.
Obviously, new system on old OS would be the fastest, but is that really the best choice?
I was trying to choose between vista 64bit and XP 64bit, I decided to chose Vista although I know my new system would kick a lot more butt if I was running XP 64bit.