Explorer/Finder is unfortunatly one of the most important bits of an OS, from the users point of view. Everyone has to navigate their way around, and even good desktop searching (google,etc) doesn’t get around that completely.
IMO Vista’s explorer especially misses the boat when compared to Leopard’s new finder on OSX. File-copy aside, in Leopard you can view most types of file in the new finder without launching external programs, and it’s very fast (quicklook coverflow). This is such a boon because often I’m wondering exactly what’s in that word doc, etc, and there’s always a disconnect to opening a few files to compare (say they’re similar) and then remembering which is which; it’s a painful process. (http://www.apple.com/findouthow/guidedtours/leopard.html)
Then again I’m always pissed at my mac w/ Tiger (or whatever comes before leopard) because it treats images just like any other file and gives me a small icon. Double-click and it opens in preview (equivalent of Adobe Reader) which doesn’t allow you to easily look at other images. Even MS w/ XP had this done right for a long time (filmstrip view and built-in slideshow), and it’s taken Apple quite some time to fix this issue. Sure there’s iPhoto (mine is iLife '07), but I don’t like it, and I don’t want to have to put all my photos into iPhoto just so I can page through them. But Apple fixed this, so that’s good, all I need to do is upgrade 
I’m no mac fanboy, but the reason Apple’s getting more popular is because they work pretty hard to make it seem easy. I like Vista too and it’ll get over these speed bumps. I think we need both OS’s because competition keeps them both on their toes.