I actually found the Start menu incredibly useful in Windows 7. Admittedly it was a usage pattern they indicated: I would pin commonly used apps to the Start Menu and would rarely if ever open up beyond that.

I would also use the auto-complete to find things as a second (distant) use case.

One thing that always annoyed me about the Start Menu was how companies would use it. For example, shortcuts notwithstanding I would have to go:

Start > Programs > Firaxis > Civilization IV > Civilization IV Beyond the Sword

The part that really annoyed me was putting the company name in there. I don't care. In fact it may not even be obvious who the company is that makes something you want to use.

I actually bought a copy of Windows 7 retail version for the explicit purpose of using it from computer to computer for years to come, probably in XP-like time frames (ie 5-10 years).

Microsoft needs to realize that these infrequent expensive upgrades (largely for features nobody cares about) are a decade out of date.

Honestly, there's still nothing wrong with XP. Microsoft just went out of their way to kill it by deliberately not supporting it with things they definitely could've. One of the great things about XP was the low resource requirements (minimum 128M of RAM). IIRC 64-bit Windows 7 is at 2GB minimum now. For what exactly?