Great, it will be like the jump from XP to Vista all over again. They'll have to support an old OS for an extra five years all the while spending the next two/three years coming up with a fix for their "revolutionary" new OS.

Thanks for bringing up Classic Shell. Those free mods might actually make W8 bearable. And I'm pretty sure it won't be long before there's a hacked W8 version that does away with all the metro bullshit.

But Vista was a really, really great OS, as was ME.
Why do people insist on bashing different shit?  7 is BARELY different from Vista, and it certainly doesn't "fix" any of the "problems," (high memory usage that turned out to be harmless prefetching, etc)

There were two problems with Vista. 1) MS didn't let companies have access to the driver stack before release so a lot of peripherals broke for a couple months when people upgraded. 2) OEMs regularly put the minimum specs required in pre-built machines, and Vista really needed more power. Putting out a computer with 1GB of RAM when the OS uses more than that on its own doesn't help perception for people expecting the "new thing" to be better.

ME was not really, really great. It was really, really unstable.

Great, it will be like the jump from XP to Vista all over again. They'll have to support an old OS for an extra five years all the while spending the next two/three years coming up with a fix for their "revolutionary" new OS.

Thanks for bringing up Classic Shell. Those free mods might actually make W8 bearable. And I'm pretty sure it won't be long before there's a hacked W8 version that does away with all the metro bullshit.

Pretty much. Most people really like W7. It's attractive, quick, relatively secure, and it's stable. It's been out long enough that pretty much everything remotely modern supports it. It also behaves in the same basic way that Windows has since '95.

What does the W8 desktop bring over this? A less attractive UI as far as I'm concerned. Start button replaced by a disaster. Native USB 3.0, IE10. Any boot time gained is subsequently wasted getting from the useless touch UI to the actual UI you want to use. BFD. I could care less about IE, and installing a driver for USB 3.0 support is not exactly difficult.

W8 may process audio better than W7, but I doubt it sounds better than VortexBox and MPD. I think MS totally blew it on this. W8 reminds me a lot of the Windows 3.1/95 days, and how irritating it was to jump back and forth between DOS and Windows depending on what applications would work in what. This simply should not happen. Android Jelly Bean doesn't remind me of the Nokia Communicator OS. Mountain Lion doesn't remind me of the Apple IIe.

I think MS is so desperate to break out of their 4% box of WP market share, so determined that they are RIGHT with Metro and people just need to SEE it to realize how fantastic it is, that they just don't see the Vista 2 that they have created. Obviously it's going to sell because new computers will ship with it. W8 tablets? I don't know, they could work, or they could bomb again like all previous Win tablets have. I think W7 is going to have more share for a LONG time after W8 is released though, and I think assuming W9 is not another dud, W8 will amount to little more than a blip just like Vista has.

Win8 is all about getting Windows phone exposure/market penetration and then tablets.  The desktop environment is an after thought.  Convergence for us (non Driod/iOS users), mobile marketshare for MS.

But it has a beautifully-redesigned kernel scheduler and performance enhancements across the board.
It's like Microsoft said, "Let's make the best business and desktop OS ever made and then ruin it by giving it a tablet start menu!"

I think I figured out why people find W8 so hard to use.  There's a bug in the USB driver stack that breaks a bunch of the usability features in W8, but people with PC/2 keyboards are unaffected.
If you hit Wkey and start typing, does it open a run prompt in metro?
If not, you're victim, and there are tons more bugs making windows 8 the awful OS you think it is from here.

I've been using W8 without mods since I got the RTM and I haven't had to go all the way into Metro Start and click around once.
If you have, something is wrong with either how you're using the OS or with your device drivers.

Update
So far, no USB keyboard I've tested has worked 100% properly, and it even breaks my PS/2 keyboard with the same bugs while the USB keyboard is plugged in and for a 5-minute period after the USB keyboard is unplugged.  Typical MS, breaking something as widely used as their generic USB keyboard drivers.