That’s not really true, though desktop hardware hasn’t improved anywhere near as much as laptops, where the difference is very substantial. Computer hardware of equivalent cost or high-/low-endness has gotten quite a lot faster (and much more power-efficient); for many sorts of tasks similar CPUs will be four or more times as fast. But it’s really SSDs where the most obvious improvements have occurred, and for most practical computing terms, compare a fast and expensive HDD machine of ten years ago with a cheap SSD machine from now and the modern one will be waaaay faster.
Yeah, a large reason Vista got lambasted so widely was because netbook form factors were gaining steam at the same time, and Microsoft had built it with the assumption that most new users would be using contemporary desktop-class machines. The old assumption that users would throw out their old equipment and upgrade to something in step with Moore's Law was no longer valid.
