Most of the time it isn't worth the bother of downloading the latest version, since they're either bug fixes for games you don't own (or play), or minor improvements to stuff you don't use.
Aye, I don't upgrade unless there is something noticeably wrong with them anyway. I am keeping an eye on the newer drivers for BF3 though, just so I can get a little higher FPS
To be honest, even before my 8800s died I was beginning to notice the driver quality with nVidia was going down. Features that had been in there since the GeForce 4 have slowly started to disappear, like the texture sharpening stuff that was really excellent (not Ansitropic Filtering, a separate thing). There was a full screen video external thing that disappeared to that annoyed a friend of mine too.
I don't think there is so much of the ATi Driver issue any more, only really in multi GPU setups are they really having any issues and that's due to their slowness of updating profiles, and not allowing users to choose temporarily.
