It enraged me when I first heard it like its enraging you now, 003. But just think about it....cutting backwards compatability will give MS and the gaming industry much more room to move forward, so things will be better in the long run. This will also force people still hanging on Windows 95/98/ME to move on, which is a great number of the non-enthusiast computer user population. To them, there is no reason to even move to XP because all software still supports 9x. This is going to force the average user into the 21st century and make things better for the gamer as well.
Once again, as I've said before, I am keeping my current system completely intact for playing current games, rather than trying to emulate them on Vista.