Well, if he's really said so then we have no reason to worry.
It's true that they have a good track record with IL2. I'm running 46 on a 3 year old system (AMD AthlonXP 2600+, 1.2GB RAM, Nvidia 6600GT 128MB) and while i can't max out everything, i can still run at 1024x768 on high detail settings or 1280x1024 on medium.
I will need to upgrade either way but i'm holding out on it because i'm leaving for 12 month military duty in May. So, when i get back and get a new PC it will be better than what i'd get if i upgraded now and probably run BoB even better.
As for Vista, we can't avoid using it in the long run but we can postpone it until they fix things. Due to Vista's issues many gamers stick with XP, so after the initial "no XP support from now on" there's word of a Service Pack 3 for XP around the corner. Vista also had the SP1 Beta released recently. In fact, not only gamers stick with XP, there have been rumors about big companies in the PC industry installing Vista in their offices and rolling back to XP within a week
XP had its issues too, but with SP2 it's one of the most stable windows versions ever. So i guess the same will happen with Vista after a while. And since we can have a new SP3 to keep XP up to date, this wait will not be a big deal. The thing is that they rush their projects and that's where most problems come from. I didn't upgrade to XP immediately because of that (i was running win98 2nd edition till the release of SP1) and i'm not upgrading to Vista for the same reason. But if Vista goes the way of XP, in a couple of years we'll have a stable system again. So i don't see this as too much of a big deal.
By the way, is the effects=2 trigger something i missed (i don't know what it is) or is it in the 4.09 Beta? The only thing i remember changing in the conf.ini file was the water detail level and i think there was another trigger for trees. Can someone give me a list of the most used conf.ini settings that alter graphics?