I don't think ATI moving to the CCC was really necessary, but I've had no problems with it and have found ATI's drivers to be very solid in the last three or more years. But as for this new graphics card, I agree it's best to wait for DirectX 10 instead of shelling out big bucks for a high-end DirectX 9 card.
People who upgrade on a regular or semi-regular basis would be surprised to know that the CPU's used for this guide are actually a lot better than they believe. Obviously it helps to have a lot of RAM (it's cheap these days anyway), but the video card is really the biggest thing when it comes to gaming. Mainstream gaming cards are inexpensive, but the biggest barrier seems to be that people with older machines only have an AGP slot and not PCI-E. This limits their upgrade options, more so when AGP cards of the same flavor are more expensive. It comes down to if you are willing to spend money on an older PC or buy something new when you can. This is a good guide though, and it would be great to see it refreshed a couple of times a year.
I would not draw any conclusions yet since we are talking about a beta with beta drivers, but I remember when Windows XP first came out and a lot of companies washed their hands of supporting games under the then-new OS. Many companies simply came out and said that they could only support their games under the operating systems which they were originally designed for and that they would not be held responsible for compatibility with Windows XP. The result was that many of us resorted to using a dual-boot between Windows 98SE (or ME) and XP for a while. After a couple of years, I got rid of 9x on my main computer and relegated it to an older computer in case I had some older games that didn't play or play well under Windows XP. Looks like I will be following a similar pattern between XP and Vista. Hard drives are so cheap now anyway.
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