I've been setting up a few machines with Vista. (Retail, not any of the pre-release builds) These are just some observations, and I'll add more as I notice them:

1. Vista install seems to be able to see hard drives even when the bios doesn't. In my particular case, I have 2 HDs, one SATA and one IDE. The IDE is connected as the secondary channel Master. Because it's caused problems in the past with XP Installs, (particularly drive letter assignments) my method is to first set the secondary master mode to "none" rather than auto, then disable the secondary IDE channel altogether in the bios. For an XP Install, this works just as well as unplugging the drive. However, on both a Vista Ultimate fresh install, and a Business Upgrade, setup detected the second drive, even though the bios and XP said it wasn't there. Picked up the partition name and size like it was a fully working drive. It was not detected once Vista actually loaded.

2. Vista Ultimate is detected by Berk as Longhorn, while Vista Business is detected as Vista.

3.vLite is out, though still very short on options. (the vista version of nLite) It does let you disable UAC during install, which is nice.

More once I've had a chance to play with the systems. So far Seti times seem to be on par with XP, though I'm going to give it a week or so just to be sure.