Want to by a macbook but a few things concern me...

I just want to make a little point here: its true that Vista will run on older PCs, but not with all the features, such as Microsoft's highly touted Aero. With Aero on, I'd say to run Vista smoothly 1 GB is necessary, 2 GB best. In the meantime, my school has some iMac G5s, running at 1.8 GHz and 512 MB RAM and running Tiger perfectly fine. There's no "special feature" of Tiger that isn't enabled in that iMac, yet 512 MB of RAM is already running it fine. 1 GB running "full Vista" isn't the same experience as running "full Tiger" on 512 MB.

 

The OP as well as others feel that Leopard will not work well on the Macbook hardware or even older Macs. The OP also agrees that he has those concerns because of many Windows user's experience upgrading to Vista so people feel the experience will be the same in Leopard. That's all I mentioned earlier, I don't know where you got the bashing from?
That said, you sound like Bill Gates son and we are not allowed to say one thing negative about the almighty Windows Vista. It's an open forum, we can say we want.

OS X Tiger and Vista do not share the same offerings on performance with older hardware. Nobody will agree with you here about that. I have an old PowerBook Pismo G3 made back in 2000 (nearly 8 years ago) and it runs Tiger beautifully and I use 384MB ram. Granted it's not a powerhouse for heavy programs but the iLife suite runs great.
Try installing Vista on a PC that old (that is if you can install it).

The Leopard experience should be great as OS X just keeps getting better and the GMA 950 shouldn't be an issue at all.