There's this big useless Window Phone interface on my desktop. (Yes, I have a Windows 7.5 phone and do like the interface... on a phone...)
Vista, not so much, but no one I know preferred the two-column layout of the start menu in XP.
I did nothing to make this work: http://i.imgur.com/AGShX.png
It's just ridiculous to have to switch visual interfaces from desktop to start screen to gain access to a programs list. There's no good reason to have to do it (ie it wasn't done that way due to superior design choice); and the reason it is that way, stems from mistakes that Microsoft made in the past, that left them drastically behind Android and iOS in mobile. It's an extremely simple thing made unnecessarily more complex and visually annoying for anybody doing work.
For example, if I have an Excel spreadsheet open, why on earth should I have to dive into the start screen just to pull up a list of programs? It's bad design.
Just like iTunes, the Windows 7 Start Menu seems only useful for people who don't organize their program menu. I organize mine similar to how KDE does it (but I was doing it long before I ever saw KDE) and I can find any app in about 3 clicks.
1. The ability to pin my frequently-used items manually.
2. Showing the recently-used apps that I haven't gotten around to pinning.
3. The way it arranged hundreds of app icons in a halfway-memorable heirarchy. (Yes, I know that makes me a small minority "power user", but Windows had always catered to us PUs.)
I never, ever, used search and don't like having to use it in Win8. The background search service had such a bad habit (at least through Vista) of churning my disk drive at the worst possible moment that I disabled it wherever possible.
It's a little customizable bundle of joy, and it'll optionally boot you directly to the desktop.
And just out of curiosity in response to a comment below, I typed "powershell" into this menu's search and it instantly found powershell.exe and powershell_ise.exe
After about two weeks, I find Windows 8 more productive.
What is a bit disorienting is that the mouse is being deprecated, somewhat. I believe that Microsoft has determined that the interfaces of the future are keyboard and touch. Windows 8 does a lot of things from the keyboard...like switching between modes.
The more I use it, the more impressed I am with the way in which the two modes, Metro and Desktop, integrate.