In preparation for this portion of my Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 (RC1) review, I went back and re-read my compatibility report for Windows Vista Beta 2. I'm a bit surprised that I wrote that Beta 2 compatibility was "excellent" overall, though I must have mean that only in the context of previous betas.
Yes, that's my story and I'm sticking with it.
The reason is simple. In RC1, hardware and software compatibility is, in fact, excellent. But it's excellent in ways that previous Vista pre-release builds were not. It's excellent even when compared to Windows XP, and I don't write that lightly. It's just excellent, with no caveats.