Splashed across the Windows Vista Team blog is a message from Mike Nash declaring that Windows Vista SP1 has been released to manufacturing, which means it’ll start being available to customers in March, starting with Microsoft Volume Licensing customers.

“Service Pack 1 is a very important milestone because it addresses many of the key issues that our customers have identified with Windows Vista over the last year both, directly and through programs like the Customer Experience Improvement Program,” he writes. “With Service Pack 1, we have made great progress in performance, reliability and compatibility.”

Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? This is the moment IT administrators have been waiting for, after all, a service pack that fixes everything that’s kept them from deploying Vista up to this point.

But don’t expect this announcement to hasten Vista adoption across the Windows universe. I’ve talked to a lot of IT pros about Vista in the past year, and many of them say they’re going to hold off on this OS as long as they can, SP1 or not. There are just too many compatibility concerns, and those who have had a peek at Vista SP1 aren’t feeling much better about it. A look at some of the comments on Microsoft’s own Channel 9 discussion board for developers shows that people are still struggling to get their arms around this monster.

I’m going to spend the day working on an analysis piece about this, so please give me a shout if you’re interested in sharing your Vista experiences and what the coming release of Vista SP1 may or may not mean for your IT environment.