I've been using Vista Basic for a few months, and have had no problems with it. That said, I use it for gaming and Internet browsing, and not much else (that's all I use my computer for anyway).
I had Office installed on my XP partition, but I just downloaded and installed Open Office on Vista last night. It seems to be working quite well.
Because of the new overhead processes introduced by Vista, I would suggest that 4 GB is the new 2 GB in terms of memory needs. My computer is running fine with 2 GB, but I suspect it would be smoother with 4.