Windows Vista: Built in HIPS?

While watching the MAC commercial that pokes fun at the PC, the last commercial seems to indicate that Vista now comes with some sort of HIPS. Going on-line, I see that what they are referring to is the User Account Control in Vista.

Can anyone explain what this is? Good feature?

 

Description here

http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Understanding-User-Account-Control-Vista.html

 

there's a podcast all about it here -
http://www.twit.tv/sn83

 

Hello,
This thing means you have to do 2x as many steps to achieve anything you were used to before. Nothing more. Nothing less. It's as hipsy as an old grandma's kevlar prosthetic.
Mrk

 

Is it actually any extra protection (I have not used Vista yet), or is it just a widget/applet to configure/use existing security (of the NT/2k/xp platform) ?

To be more technical from a hacker/attacker point of view does it reduce the the number of angles of attack, or is it purely user stuff to try and prevent them running unwant crud ?

 

I think it might be a nice feature and from what I´ve read I understand that if you are used to responding to alerts from your HIPS, you won´t find UAC really that annoying. Of course I don´t know if you can fine tune UAC to alert only about certain stuff, I think Symantec is working on this. However, I´ve also read that UAC might be easily bypassed, so I would still use a HIPS.