One thing I noticed from the tech preview I tried the other month was that whilst the press excitedly noticed new "settings" apps in parallel with the control panel and proudly announced new technologies, there is still decades of old cruft lying around. I know they have much work to do but it still feels like an operating system of many parts, all glued together.
Some issues I noticed in the preview I tried:
1. The underlying system hasn't changed (still life in COM land with the joys/distresses of the registry and cryptic UUID keys where half of the configuration is secretly stored)
2. The icons in MMC don't match anything else on the system (even the icons in Control Panel are not consistent - are they flat or should they have depth? Should they have no perspective or should they be set at a jaunty angle?)
3. Even the icons in Explorer don't match each other (my user directory doesn't match any of the icons beneath it)
4. The new Settings window is not resizable even though it is 50% white space
5. Control Panel is still there despite this new Settings window (duplication!)
6. Explorer permits you to show menus but they're actually just the tabs on a frustrating ribbon bar
7. Notebook theme issues that were introduced in Windows XP still persist (Explorer's Folder Options window has a white tab and border for the General page but the General page itself is grey; when you switch to the View and Search pages in this very same notebook those pages are white without a hint of grey; this General page is written without knowledge of theming..? plus none of the controls line up!)
8. There is still no consistent Open Dialog (Notepad uses a different Open dialog to MMC, for example; the MMC one is from about 1995, I was surprised there wasn't a briefcase on it!)
9. There appears to be no HIG for menu placement in relation to toolbars (is the menu ABOVE the toolbar or below it?; control panel menu is below the toolbar, Explorer is above, Settings app doesn't even have one), should true menubars be allowed (like in Notepad) or should they just be placeholders for ribbons (like in Explorer)?
It's all just a big ball of different GUI styles and fashions from 25+ years of fashions, windowing toolkits (yes, you can find the MFC40 and 42 DLLs in the Windows directories in this, and yes .NET is there too, but the ancient Windows API will still work fine too, plus Win32!), user-interface guidelines from different decades and generally a mess.
I will wait to see how people rate it before installing.
EDIT: I notice downvotes but no responses?? I thought my points were valid - the mishmash of libraries from decades and decades with artwork from those decades makes for a convoluted jumbled experience. You wouldn't feel comfortable in a car that had a klaxon for the horn, a handbrake outside and a gear system with no synchromesh but that sported a brand new LCD illuminated dashboard - it would feel a mishmash and a mess. This is precisely what this feels like, and something I thought they would like to jettison or at least tidy up.