Hmm. I agree with what you say here, but for the opposite reasons.
That is:
I think any OS will deteriorate over time with use. The question is how the OS deals with this fact. The Windows method of memory management and defragging is... passable, but not nearly flexible or versatile for modern machines. For one thing, it's horrendous at dealing with boot configurations. And that reminds the user that Windows (up to 7!) doesn't appear to have any sort of actual boot configurator that even a hard-core geek could use.
What's more, while I see where you're going, and I agree with the thrust, I actually disagree with you that "Push Button Reset is great for geeks." It's the opposite of great for us; what we'd like to do is be able to manage clean reinstalls, and most of all to be able to partition hard disks to our liking. Considering that Windows 7 offers less partitioning options and capabilities than Windows 95 did (seriously, think about that for a moment) and that Vista was the first in a decade even to allow partitioning, we're far from a Windows which affords actual control over the machine or the media that goes into it.
That's really the thing here to me, as a geek. What does Windows 8 have to offer me to impress me and make me happy as a user? The ability to partition seamlessly; the ability to force a partitioning over errors if I want to; the ability to reinstall seamlessly as many times as I need to, to burn reinstallation software as many times as I need to; the ability to easily and directly configure boot parameters, and to make a boot sturdy and permanent for all users on a machine running multiple partitions with differing encryption levels; finally, direct manipulation of inodes/indexes. These are all things which are still, so far as I can tell, flatly impossible within the context of Windows; and where any of them is possible, it's only with the help of expensive software. Whereas a person with a free, burned copy of Knoppix on a disk can do all of them in five minutes with any computer she choose.
I'm not even saying Windows is evil here, or anything like it. It's just that it doesn't in any way meet what I need out of an operating system; there is no control over even the slightest thing, like indexing or bad-sector flags or defragging or partitioning or anything. And I sometimes wonder how Windows developers convince themselves that they're producing a powerful system.
Maybe some of them can answer this; I know they're reasonably intelligent. Do any of you know why Windows won't offer these things? And what we're supposed to do in a world where more and more operating systems do?