You had to take into consideration two things regarding DirectX 10.
First, as Dirhael says, adaptation to a new API takes time. BioShock was designed for DirectX 9, they threw DirectX 10 in there as a bonus, they could have published it in form of a patch later, and no one would care. With all the pressure from the market, the mass media and (specially) from 2K Games, they had to finish the game in time. Taking advantage of DirectX 10 would be a tremendous loss of time, and a probably a scrap of a lot of code. Not worth it.
Second, driver immaturity. Vista drivers are underperforming right now, both with new (which are taking quite a big hit in performance) and older ones (the hit is smaller). Designing a DirectX 10-only game now it's a suicide for every gaming company, even if they take little time to finish it, as the game will run like crap even in extremely powerful hardware. Lost Planet is the best example of this. And what's worse, a huge loss of money for the Vista gaming market is pretty much zero.
As time passes, and people learns around the possibilities of DirectX 10, things will progress for everyone. Until that moment, DirectX 10 would only be a supposedly easy API for developers, a questionable move on Microsoft's part for Vista adoption, a good excuse for nVidia to sell GeForce 8800 cards like candy, and a unfilled promise for users.
Finally, it's the modern world, nudone. Everything is hype. Gaming magazines and sites are probably the worst in this regard, they reached the point of "no trust" as they sold themselves for the petty money. And what's more, some of them are not run by adult men and women, but by hyperactive kids with the looks of adult people. You gotta see how many exclamation marks they use in some of their reviews, they're like little girls screaming "yay!" in every sentence
. Meanwhile others opted for the opposite side of the spectrum, turning into egocentric snobs, clutching at straws, just like movie critics. There should be an honest middle point.
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. So Opera FTW! (is not that I was using Firefox anyway... 
. Although easy in nature, that would demand some cooperation from software authors providing documentation about the settings used by the program. Most registry entries are easily figured, but some others are misleading. Implementing later plugins for backing up those settings would be trivial. The plugins should provide information about the location of the settings of the registry to back up, and what is controlled by those settings. The program would parse that and generate a tree list, with checkboxes for the different settings entries, and which part of the program they handle. You select what you want and zip!, backup created.
