Win8's UI was terrible because Microsoft are terrible at UI, not because of the duality.
I had friends who worked on the UX team for 8 and they reported general malfeasance all around. Microsoft was very scarred that tabled were going to take over the world (that was common wisdom in the trade presses at the time) and iPad sales used to be absurdly high. Win8 was the result of a scared company that needed to release something.
Microsoft has since abandoned essential practices that make GUIs work, in addition to abandoning taste and organization. Windows is a sorry shitshow of defective design and defective function.
Don't agree? Then back up your objection instead of anonymously downvoting, crybaby. So tiresome.
My first job in 1990, we had a load of PCs running DOS, and one Mac with a GUI and which also played sound and could read laserdisks (as I recall). Changing the error sound to "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" never got old.
Windows 95 just about got to feature parity with the Mac 5 years later. It was really nice, but not exactly massively innovative.
I didn’t know anything about PCs, having grown up with Apple, but every Mac I’d used had sound and graphics, so I told him as far as I could tell it was all marketing crap.
Never occurred to me that PCs couldn’t do multimedia out of the box.
Where MS actually did groundbreaking UI/UX work was in the 00s, ironically for most things not Windows - Media Center, Xbox 360, Zune/WP.
And of course they had to ruin it with botched product management and their bulldozing Metro/UWP everywhere strategy. The Windows 8.1 UX on a tablet was actually pretty good. Too bad it a) sucked on everything else, b) app integration was spotty due to relegating Win32 to second class.