I have a hard time imagining that many Windows 7 users are eager to upgrade to Windows 8 on their desktops and laptops, given the drastic changes catering to touch interaction, bringing them little apparent value at best, and significant lost productivity and frustration at worst. My Windows 7 box is for gaming and productivity (not necessarily in that order), and after all I've seen of it, I wouldn't touch Windows 8…
Have you actually used Windows 8? I don't make much use of the metro apps, but there are lots of smaller improvements that I appreciate, like the new task manager, file copy dialog, login screen, etc. The sight of the new start screen incites revulsion in most power users, but try to remember that you won't be spending much time there. Treat the start screen like what it really is: a fancier start menu. Like me, you'…
It was bad. So bad I can't articulate its dreadfulness...
Animations were jumpy, to open an app that's not in the "start screen" you have to right click and press some button to go to another screen, to switch apps you have to hover your mouse on top-left corner and wait 400ms for the list of open apps, there's no way to "search" for apps.
If you're in the (classic) desktop mode, you have to click on bottom-left to go back to start screen, then right click on the screen and click on "more" and manually select the app you want to open.
It took me 3 minutes to find a way to turn off the damn thing (you must hover on top-right, wait for a kinda contextual menu, go to "Settings -> Power -> Turn Off".
I played an AVI movie, and the default player (I don't know what it was, but didn't look like Windows Media Player) was sooo bad it's not even funny. Whenever you move the mouse, on-screen controls appear and you have to right click two times to get rid of them, and I think there were no volume controls either. And by on-screen controls, I mean on-screen, in the sense that it dims your movie, places a gigantic status bar and some buttons in the center of the screen, and doesn't respond to keyboard commands.
The PowerShell is a joke. I accidentally right clicked on it and for exactly 2 minutes, it was displaying errors. Even simple commands like "ls" were slow (like you're using telnet on a dial-up modem).
Internet Explorer was very nice.
The Finder (don't remember what it's called on Windows) was much better, but that Microsoft Office 2007-like bar on top was a little buggy and confusing (You click on items to open it, but if you want to close it, you can't click on the same items again. You have to click on a button that's appeared in the right side).
I'm an Apple fan, but I can assure you, I really, really did want Win 8 to be good, even though I would never use it. But it was worse than what I expected, and now I'm certain that it'll be worse than Vista for MS. After all, when someone like me (who was an advanced Windows user up until 4-5 years ago, and is very comfortable with computers) was confused by the changes and the stupid UI (with many mistakes is usability), how would average users react to it?