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This suspicion has been confirmed repeatedly from my own experience using Windows 8 and watching others use it as well.
When WinPhone first came out with the Metro UI I was a fan - there's a visual simplicity to it that's very appealing. After you use it for a while though the weaknesses become pretty glaring and hard to accept. It is often very hard to tell what UI elements are interactive and what are purely informational because they are so plain. There's no way to visually discern a non-interactive icon vs. an icon that is also a button.
The lack of shading and UI chrome also means that UIs frequently become jumbled. Sections of UI blur together where on any other platform they would've been separated by a visual line, shading, or something else.
The simplicity in this case has gone too far.
It's also very true that many of the first-party apps have ludicrously low information density, almost as if they expect these devices to be toys. This is in stark contrast to MS's stated goal of shipping something that is more serious, more productive than iPads and Android tablets, which up until now have been seen as leisure devices.
People often accuse Apple of taking style over substance, but Win8 IMO is a far, far more egregious violator.
There's another big issue: the first party apps suffer from some pretty serious performance problems. It doesn't bode well for your platform when your own internal teams can't ship best of breed apps. The People app, for example, takes literally 6 seconds to load your recent notifications on a Surface RT - all the while without displaying any loading indicator. You literally tap the button, wait, figure it's broken, and just as you're about to move on it pops into existence - and of course the performance is so poor that it just magically appears on screen without transition.
The entire OS is littered with sloppiness of this variety - as well as apps where touchability has clearly never been comprehensively addressed. You will move from places with gloriously comfortable touch targets (like the home screen) to apps that have 9pt text links you're expected to hit.
The "search" charm is also poorly thought out. Just take a look at Amazon, eBay, iTunes, and what have yous that have substantial search functionality - Windows expects everyone to cram their search needs into a single freeform text input. In fact, the eBay app on Win8 builds its own search page. Surprise, search is complex, context dependent, and not all apps can pigeon-hole it into your paradigm. Oops.
[edit] Extra rant: I was able to get the Windows Store app completely stuck today on the Surface. I visited an app's detail page, and tapped the Back button to get back to the search results. Nope. Back button would visually indicate interaction but do nothing. Waited, nope. Sloppy bug.
So here's where it gets good. On any other platform (and in old Windows land) I could just go kill it. Except I have no idea how to go about quitting an app on Windows 8. Apple at least has the courtesy of allowing you to kill an app very quickly - if someone knows how to do it in Win8 I'd love to know, because clearly their own first-party apps are not good enough to be trusted to take care of themselves.
I don't use "Metro" mode. But I do appreciate many of the tweaks, and I'm still grinning over my cold boot times with Win8, UEFI, and SSD. I swear it boots faster than it resumes from sleep. (Resume from sleep is fast, but it seems the NIC takes a few extra seconds to re-establish a link)
Windows 8 must be the slowest train wreck in computing history, it's been being reviewed as crap for over a year now and they keep chugging along. It's funny to read all the comments from over a year ago and how nothing has changed since then - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/10/18/designing-sear...
It isn't a compelling purchase at all, nobody will go out and actively seek a Windows 8 device, and desktop / notebook computers have had decreased sales since everyone has one now and they are "good enough" for media consumption and text / spreadsheet editing. The only reason anyone needs more horsepower now is for graphical horsepower for animation or gaming or computational horsepower for compiling or running a server.
So nobody wants Windows 8. It is a product without a target market, and the Surface has fallen flat on its face as a one trick pony to try to corner a "market" on a tablet with a desktop.
And hopefully in a year we have a mature Ubuntu running on Android tablets just fine, and that IMO will be a much nicer desktop experience on mobile than Microsoft Window and the Windows 7 desktop at 7". Except for a tiny, tiny market of businesses that will buy surfaces for their employees to use the mobile versions of word and excel I don't see this train leaving the station.
Wow. Scathing: One of the worst aspects of Windows 8 for power users is that the product's very name has become a misnomer. "Windows" no longer supports multiple windows on the screen. Win8 does have an option to temporarily show a second area in a small part of the screen, but none of our test users were able to make this work. Also, the main UI restricts users to a single window, so the product ought to be renamed…
Metro apps, or whatever they are calling them nowadays, do take over the entire screen, desktop apps are as they have always been and can be opened as many as you like, and arranged as you like given your screen real-estate. I routinely have 5-10 windows open at any given time on my desktop that is running Windows 8.
The start menu was always kind off useless so I didn't take long to get used to not having it there, I launch everything via search now (hit the Windows key and start typing).
linux
for example, the only being able to run one fullscreen app at a time thing. the proliferation of iPads has shown us that users love this, in the right context. The desktop PC just isn't the right context.
Have been using a Surface as well as a Win8 desktop for a couple of weeks now, and I have to say this is pretty accurate. When WinPhone first came out with the Metro UI I was a fan - there's a visual simplicity to it that's very appealing. After you use it for a while though the weaknesses become pretty glaring and hard to accept. It is often very hard to tell what UI elements are interactive and what are purely info…