I view it as a Windows 8 ninja rapidly switching between all sorts of tasks I vaguely understand, and the relationship between the gesture and the computer's response seems hard to follow.
Maybe the OS is really easy to use, but their marketing would make me think twice before buying a Windows 8 machine.
I find this aspect of Win8 (switching between Modern UI mode and desktop mode) bafflingly, appallingly bad. It's one of the shortcoming that personally affects me the least (because I never find myself needing to use Modern UI mode), but it is undoubtedly one of the most egregious design decisions.
In a recent conversation with my dad, the archetypal non-computer-guy, he said he wanted a computer with "idiot mode". The problem with win8 is that, while it has the simplified modern UI mode, I can't see it being comprehensive enough for really anyone's computing needs. So you end up switching back and forth between regular and modUI, which for a user like my dad is just a usability nightmare. Switching between both modes is vastly more complex than using either mode exclusively, but you're virtually forced into switching, at least occasionally. I mean, having chrome and IE installed on the same machine is a bit of a stretch to begin with, but when you have two versions of each browser, it's break-down-in-tears laughably bad.
I'm reminded of Larry Tesler's famous "no modes" activism [1] which I first heard about in Bret Victor's truly excellent "Inventing on Principle" presentation. [2]
His example was that he tried to google how to do something and he was launched into the weather app. His accompanying screenshot was that of the charms bar with search and he typed in the word Barcelona AND selected the third option for him (which is the weather app). He spends the next 40 seconds talking about "goblin farts".
I mean seriously .... what kind of garbage critique is that ?
He is not even close to "being spot on" from the first ten minutes of the video and I doubt I should even bother watching the last ten minutes.