Win 7's glowing reviews - a case of lowered expectations?

Windows 7 was publicly released as a beta last week, and has been getting some pretty glowing reviews. I haven't yet seen a single negative review - everything I've seen compares Windows 7 much favourably over Vista and in many cases even over XP. ZDNet's review is pretty typical of most reviews I've read. Even traditional Microsoft haters (who shall go un-named) seem to be reacting favorably to Windows 7. Of course there are some brand new features, but I'm more concerned with the stability and snappiness of the OS.

While a lot of the praise is well deserved and a lot of people have worked hard on making Windows 7 what it is, I can't help but wonder how much of it is a result of peoples' lowered expectations from Microsoft with regards to Windows. Vista wasn't nearly as good as it should have been when it released (SP1 seems to have fixed a lot of stability issues, though it is still a resource hog) and the generally negative buzz about Vista has probably reduced expectations to the point where anything that's not sluggish, bloated and resource hungry would've received good feedback.

Anyways, nothing wrong with good reviews... here's hoping that Windows 7 will exceed all expectations when it's publicly released.