1) The license changes were directly from decades of user feedback: people don't buy upgrades to Windows, they buy machines with Windows on it. Microsoft listened and now Windows is licensed and updated perpetually to a given hardware configuration.
2) Windows still supports Local Accounts as well as it ever has, and with feedback it's now much more obvious how to create one if you don't want "cloud lock-in". With the latest build out to Insiders even Cortana allows you to use a Local Account and opt in sign in to a Microsoft account only for Cortana features. Certainly seems to me that Microsoft is listening and trying to balance the feedback of the paranoids like you and the people that appreciate the convenience of cloud features such as myself...
3) Giant Enterprise "Threshold 2" release is expected to drop November-ish with greater support for GPO, BYOD, LTS, and all the Enterprise appeasing buzzword acronyms that "admins" love and users live with and/or hate. Microsoft appears to be collecting a lot of feedback to work on to build this Enterprise push, including a lot of feedback from the few companies to actually try and use Windows 8 (as opposed to all the ones steadfastly "Windows XP or Death"/"LTS for Life"), which had a lot stronger Enterprise capabilities than people seem to have given it credit for...
4) The UI is doing a lot of things that people want and ask for: better handling different DPI across multiple screens, better handling touch, better handling DPI in general, increasing better access to good typography and design principles. Apple does it and gets applauded, Microsoft tries to do it and people call them tyrants and "brow beating". Here again, Microsoft is clearly doing everything they can do based on the feedback they are getting. So much so that they've even backpedaled on many of the things that once made "Modern Apps" truly "Modern" in terms of fresh, smarter approaches to common problems (I was a fan of the Charms bar and what it tried to accomplish, may it rest in peace; also, hamburger menus, sigh). Apple never had to deal with as much "who moved my cheese" hatred in the transition between Carbon and Cocoa as Microsoft seems to be working with here.