I've installed Windows 8 on a VM and played around with it for a couple of hours, and I'm honestly wondering if I've missed an option somewhere - I cannot believe that what I'm using is meant to be the next version of MS's main desktop OS.

Just about every W8 program seems to want to run only as a single window full screen app which seems to go against pretty much everything that window-based OSs (certainly multi-tasking ones) were introduced to do. Even trying to switch between multiple open browser sessions was horribly clunky, although at least you do seem to be able to run IE on the old Windows desktop if you want - an option that I couldn't find for most of the other apps.

I'm sure this may work great on a phone/tablet, but seems totally wrong on a standard computer. Apple has had a go at fittin similar iOS features into MacOS (tablet-style program launcher/full screen mode etc), but at the moment they are thankfully entirely optional.With Windows 8, this looks to largely be the only choice.