The headline is misleading. He was talking very much, from his vested interest point of view. He was not dismissing the quality or value of win8 for consumers.

But he is allowed to be a bit upset: Steam is effectively not allowed on Metro.

And there was loyalty between Valve and Microsoft. In general, he dislikes the verticalisation in the market; how consumer devices will all be (media,game,app) consoles. But to see Microsoft make this move, just hurst more, when your company has invested so much in the windows ecosystem. And lets not forget that without Steam, pc gaming would have died completely 5 years ago.

Personally, i dont like it either. I think its anticompeteive in nature, and bad for innovation. Appearantly operating system vendors are becoming the new cable companies, charging for access to consumers.

But unless one of them (apple, google, microsoft, amazon) has a monopoly, its not illegal to operate in this manner.