This post seems to miss the point - obviously some of the commands that were less-visible or non-existent earlier would not show up on the telemetry data, but can still be important to surface in a redesign of the UI.

The newly-added buttons on the ribbon are there to address the most-requested features (by actual customers) as well as some of the missing features users most-often go to third-party plug-ins for, per the actual blog post from the Windows 8 Engineering Blog.

As for whether the UI is stream-lined or not - while simplification has its place, it is not always a good thing. The OSX Finder is surprisingly devoid of things even basic users can find useful - in many cases it isn't easy to find the appropriate menu option or shortcut to perform these actions - personally I think it goes too far by way of simplification.

It is good to make computers easy-to-understand - but by attempting to remove the learning curve COMPLETELY you can also damage the productivity a computer can provide. The sweetspot, of course, is somewhere in the middle.