I'm sure Microsoft was aware of John Wall's co before they landed on Vista as the name for their new OS. (BTW, "Longbranch" was always designated as the working title of the new OS, and never considered to be the name that would be used.) I don't know how large Wall's co is, but if I were him, I'd be jumping for joy over the news, and imagine that his "terse comments" are merely a pre-discussions front.
As far as speculating is concerned, (varying degrees of), risk goes w/ the territory. Risk is weighed against the potential rewards and is relative to the cutoff point of acceptable loss. I have treaded lightly w/ Vista, due more to getting a late start, (by 3das), and not being able to find enough "2nd round pick-ups" or "1st round misses", that I felt would warrant more risk. I got into LED, RFID, Mobi, "Blink" tech, ogg and a few other emerging areas, well ahead of the curve, and was willing to risk more funds there, because of the broader selection avail due to arriving early. (Of course, the difficulty w/ getting in early, is that there is less assurance that the category you are in, is actually viable, at all, and if it's an extremely new technology, finding enough useful info to figure out how the technology will be applied and what names will be the most relevant for it's future uses.
To my mind, risking the expense of reg fees, for a year or two, for domain name's that relate to a new Microsoft OS, (that may or may not be w/ us for years), particularly when the OS name associates well w/ an existing mark- eg "Windows" : "Vista"- is a risk worth taking. However, and I say this in all sincerity, I do give alot of creedence to some of my dreams, as axilant has done. O.o.