Nvidia, the Vista vandal?

As my Dell XPS laptop wings its way to Sydney where technicians will try and pinpoint the Nvidia graphics card-related problem that has rendered it inoperable, information has come to light about Nvidia's destabilising impact on Windows Vista.
The hundreds of pages of email correspondence released as part of the 'Vista Capable' lawsuit have cast up a new revelation (see page 47 of the document) - that Nvidia accounted for 29 per cent of Vista crashes last year. I can relate to this, it was an unstable Nvidia driver that ruined my first, otherwise reasonable experience with Vista.
As this article points out, Microsoft's work with its software partners to get everything Vista-ready was woefully lacking: "Cumulatively, this data shows that the Nvidia-ATI-Intel "Axis of Driver Evil" caused almost half of the crashes in Vista! What could Microsoft have done to prevent this problem? A longer beta period probably would not have worked. Vendors weren't going to get serious about making their stuff work with Vista until they were sure that Microsoft was serious about shipping Vista. (If this sounds like a game of chicken to you, then you understand the situation perfectly)".
Ars Technica has a good write-up on the driver problems though ZDNet rightfully points out that many of those 29 per cent of "crashes" will have been no more than a flicker of the screen to black then a resumption of normal operation. That's because of Microsoft's Timeout Detection and Recovery system, which attempts to recover a computer when it hangs without making you have to reboot the system.
Still, the Nvidia driver problems caused a huge amount of grief for computer users last year, problems that are ongoing for many. In the process of doing some research to try and fix my own blue-screening, I came across this helpful webpage, which puts together an exhaustive list of fixes to graphics card problems affecting both Nvidia and its rival ATI.
It's the dreaded "Display Driver atikmdag [ATI] / nvlddmkm [Nvidia] Stopped Responding" messages that pop up after a crash that people flocking to this forum are trying to fix. And don't think it is just Vista - the complaints spread across XP as well and all sorts of hardware configurations, thought the majority of users seem to be running Vista. I tried most of the fixes and none of them worked.
Funnily enough, trialing another Dell computer last week, the Latitude XT tablet PC, I got the "atikmdag" error three times in total and it was more than a flicker of the screen before it resumed. Each time the system remained unresponsive for several minutes and one time I shut it down thinking it wasn't going to recover. All I was doing at the time was some web-surfing of news sites with Word open in the background.
I'm yet to see a good write-up on these various graphics card problems that lays out the issues in simple terms, so if anyone can point me to one I'd appreciate it. But the ongoing problems are unacceptable.
Graphics cards constitute one area we are supposed to have seen huge progress in over the last few years and indeed we have seen it - when the cards and their associated drivers work properly. In the era of Direct X 10 and more powerful graphics cards, which allow better gaming and other graphics-intensive applications, consumers shelling out for high-powered graphics capability deserve better.