The manufactures will offer Vista as soon as Microsoft tells them to. But I'm thinking XP will be available all this year as a standard option and will be the stock option till well into the year.

Consider this: you're Dell, and I'm Microsoft. You're negotiating your price for Vista Blah Edition, the one you're going to ship on literally millions of crappy little \ufffd399 Dimensions. A few pence one way or the other is going to mean millions of pounds. You've spent a lot of time and energy reducing the BOM on those boxes, shaving a few pence here and a pound there. You don't want to support two operating systems on the same crappy little boxes, and I don't want you to sell XP to end users any more.

I simply express an "opinion" that it would cost more money for me (and when I say "me", I mean "you") to license Vista AND XP, per unit, than it would to just license Vista. After all, Vista is supported and all that jazz.

If I say that it's going to be \ufffd20 per unit difference, you're going to shit bricks and install Vista and only Vista.

Edit: This appears to contradict what I said further up about XP being a choice. I should clarify this by actually saying what I'm thinking, which is that Vista will be the only option on the big-selling boxes, much like XP Home was the only option.

Posher computers, of which Dell sell far fewer, will continue to ship with XP (subject to the customer being tortured in a maze of twisty telephone menus, all alike)

Must be an American idiom. What I mean is that I expect the price will wander up and down, with some fairly violent spikes both ways. But the year long average will be around the current price + inflation.

Gotcha. Yes, that sounds about right.