not really...
"Windows Vista was riddled with bugs, offered (at best) lacklustre support for third party software and hardware..."
the ONLY issue anyone I know ever had with vista was just after launch, when there was sod all drivers around for it. that's indirectly MS's fault as a result of the huge negative publicity they managed to drum up ahead of vista's launch, but it was better drivers turning up - and not the arrival of SP1 - that caused the turnaround. I installed vista when SP1 came out - BUT DIDN'T INSTALL SP1 - and had no problems
note that drivers on win7 are generally just the vista drivers, if they work; for situations where the vista drivers don't work, some companies are still to provide updated versions for 7. This means that windows 7 has a subset of the hardware support of vista, currently (I expect that to change over time, and 7 has better support for touchscreens and sensors)
and i'm unaware of any legacy software that won't run on vista that will run on 7 (excepting the business version's XP mode, otherwise known as "I need foxpro drivers installed" mode) - indeed as vista introduced the virtual file redirection system, it copes better than xp for non-admins dealing with ancient code that expects to be able to write to the program files directory.
vista is manifestly NOT worth the development time it took to create it (mainly because they basically abandoned all progress and started again half-way through). vista blatantly did NOT live up to the hype that MS put about many years before release. These factors combined into a backlash of negative publicity which helped ensure that there'd be sod all drivers, especially for 64-bit, at launch. This in turn further fueled the backlash against it, ensuring it'd never really be popular. This is definately a failure that can be laid at microsoft's door.
But objectively, vista IS an improvement on XP, it's not "bug ridden", it's backwards-compatability support is good (there's not a single user-level app I've seen that won't run on it) and hardware support by vendors is now good
noone's denying vista was a total failure for MS, but that's no reason to go making up extra issues with it either