I hear yah. I refuse to consume just to consume. My system works fine for what I use it for. No real need to upgrade and plenty of reasons not to.
Although Vista offers plenty of new stuff, even Microsoft themselves said (via MSN news recently): "XP will be supported for many years ahead. Don't upgrade yet if you're unsure; Vista is new and still might contain plenty of things that need to be fixed." (For instance, SP1 for Vista will be released later this year, in which they'll introduce stuff from the server editions that are even further evolved than the desktop versions.)
Technology adoption is a slow process. Many companies are still developing applications at NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 level, and haven't even arrived at XP level yet. The Win32 programming interfaces are still more widespreadly used than the new .NET libraries (which arrived around XP time).
I'm totally baffled by Vista. Vista and Office 2007 are the first true innovation that I've seen from Microsoft, and they're a large step ahead of current software industry. I'm impressed. It's obvious now that they took their time and created things that are very unique. The .NET framework 3.0, introduced with Vista, for instance, contains a full graphics and animation framework (2D and 3D), in which they converged GDI and DirectX. This will make writing games easier than ever, for instance. But time might pass until it'll be widely used. I'm hopeful that application technology will improve dramatically when .NET 3.0 gets adopted properly by the software industry. It can do so much!
So, perhaps some years ahead in the future, when you buy a new computer or something with Vista preinstalled, you'll perhaps get much more than you expected!