One man's bloated is another man's fully featured. No matter what you do someone will complain, so MS will (quite rightly) stick fingers in both ears and carry on. I would   

Exactly, people will bitch that it either has something or it doesn't have something, so they might as well just carry on.  More install options would be nice, though.

list of things to include/exclude during installation. Doing this with the OS install could serve everyone. If you want the bloat, everything installs.

A noble statement, however lets examine reality a tad.
Most of us reading and responding to this post are fairly proficient with Windows and can talk about it with some reasonable facts and opinions.
The average end user however is quite a different animal. A large majority of users just don't get it. Sure, they can surf the internet and print their digital cam pics of fido and the kids on vacation, but they haven't the first clue on what is happening underneath. They don't know if they need something or not. Vista's installation is very very easy just for that reason.
At work, the same applies. The user can navigate a spreadsheet or operate the company software and such, but the knowledge ends there.

The techs among us can uninstall what we need to, and scale things back JUST LIKE WE ALWAYS HAVE. The average end user can continue in his/her expierience on the PC in a more simplified environment which is harder for them to screw up, and they won't even miss those extra MB's of ram they are using.

yeah Phoon, I thought about that *after* I hit submit.  Excellent point.

How 'bout an option...'I don't know squat, just install what Bill thinks I need'

LOL

I find it interesting that people seem to expect a newer, more powerful and feature rich operating system to not need newer, more powerful and feature rich hardware on which to run. Let's face it, the majority of computer users don't care. Sooner or later they'll go to their computer store to buy a new box that may just happen to have Vista on it.

Afterall, as you talk about Vista being bloated in terms of hardware requirements - have you looked at the hardware requirements of games recently? Not the ones advertised on the box but the realistic "play it as intended" requirements? I think you'll find those to be way beyond anything Vista will demand of users buying PC's next year.

Interesting comments.
Windows Barebones would be a lifesaver to me. I'm a simi-geek not because I want to be but because I'm forced to be (and because I have the time to be).
I can prune my OS. Makes me one of the minority. And that's something everyone here probably needs to think hard about. Most guys commenting here here really are part of that minority, it shows in your comments.
The average joe can not, will not and won't ever be able to effectively tame windows for max use. And it would scare the hell out of him to try.
He might be a cop, a soldier, a doctor, a fireman or a skydiver. He might daily go into situations that would send most of us screaming. But taming Windows is something he'll never do. So, he'll eventually be forced to buy a much more expensive computer to run bells and whistles he'll never use. And before anyone makes a snide comment about it being his responsiblity to learn, consider how much time you have to spend learning how to tame Windows.
I dunno bout you, but I'd rather have my local doctor or cop or fireman focused on his job not on trying to be a simi geek he really doesn't have the time to be.