I don't think it's because of apple ads at all. Most people have an early adopter or someone who recently bought a new machine in their circle of friends. And a big chunk of those people have had problems.

So most people are 1-2 steps removed from someone who doesn't like vista (my dad says copying files is slow, for instance). So I suspect this marketing won't even really work that well. The issue isn't whether vista is prettier or "faster", the issue is whether vista will be broken on my machine.