vista sucks, first you think wow, what the hell, this is mucho better than xp, not a moment after that, it will A: crash
B: start doing weird stuff, and eventually crash.

the transparency is pretty cool and stuff, but, it should be, considering the requirements! my suse (which I run since yesterday) is modded with beryl, and does what vista does (even more), only beryl does it better, and stable, and it will run on a slower pc.
I can't comment on office 2007, my brother haves it, and it looks different, all the pictures are so big that even a blind man can see them! and it will most likely look better, and have a few more options (which eventually lead to the same action as in previous versions), but most likely, it will also work very slow...
look at startup times...

Keep them spinning,
Bert.