I've also been playing around with it a bit (my excuse was that I needed to use Windows for some work stuff), and have had a similar experience. That is, I mostly just use the standard desktop and only see the launcher rarely. For me, it's basically just Windows 7 but very pretty. (I actually think that Microsoft now has the best graphical design with Metro.)
I did try some of the metro apps. It was a little weird--it wasn't immediately obvious how to close the metro app--but fairly nice over all. The preference for scrolling sideways is a little odd, but not difficult to get used to. The problem is that the app store doesn't have anything I actually need at the moment--the only moderately useful app I've found was the Wikipedia one, and I usually just use my browser for that. Of course, I basically live in Chrome and Emacs, so I'm not very representative :).
So, as far as design and usability goes, I'm content. However, I've had a major over-arching problem that eclipses everything else--stability. After any extended use, the computer just freezes up and most things stop working, forcing me to restart. It's probably a driver issue, but it's very annoying nonetheless.
I've had some other similar problems (for example, regedit did not work until a couple of reboots), but they do not recur often, so I can forgive them in a beta product.
In short: it's very pretty and entirely useable, but also somewhat unstable. And still not as good as Linux :).