I'm more concerned with how long it will take before they offer academic discounts on Vista because thats probably the only way I could justify buying anytime soon
Academic MSDN acounts are (basically) student discounts. Computer Science majors here are automatically signed up for academic MSDN accounts. (I assume) they're super-nerfed compared to a MSDN account you pay $2,000/year for, but I still got two free copies of XP out of it.
I would assume your university has something similar.
I have no idea how long it takes Microsoft to decide to release something like a discounted version of Vista into the gruby hands of college students, but I would assume it's within a (somewhat) reasonable timeframe.