You do have a point.
I am sure Vista is not the sole cause of the misery, but the overall experiences with Vista has been crap on laptops compared to Windows XP. I've NEVER had this much trouble with laptops compared to DOS, Win 3.x, Win95/8, NT, 2000, XP, Linux, Ubuntu, and OSX.
There is reason that I've NEVER heard of any business and enterprise system running Vista. No sys admins are masochistic enough to dare dealing with it.
All I can say is I got a laptop recently with Vista(only $399) and it's rock solid. It all depends on how the hardware is supported by the hardware vendors.
the reason businesses don't upgrade is because they don't upgrade to every version. It costs a ton of money. Businesses tend to run a lot of custom software and they'd have to update all that software. They aren't going to invest the time and resources to do that every OS release. Just no point if what they have is working fine.
My company ran windows 2000 on our primary workstations until 4 years after XP was released before they switched to that. We still have computers running windows 95. It works for what their purpose is and no one wants to spend money changing that.