The Intel thing is extremely true, but also equally true is the god awful Nvidia drivers that existed in the early days of Windows Vista. I don't even think Nvidia had a non-beta driver until 6 months after Windows Vista went gold. I think I recall seeing that Nvidia was responsible for something like 30% of crashes on Windows Vista.

Now, we could split hairs over where the failure was with that one--whether Microsoft not working enough with Nvidia, or whichever; but the point still stands.

Windows Vista walked so Windows 7 could run, essentially.