I rarely see it except on boot up, then I goto my desktop and everything is right there as I left it on windows 7.
I could understand my folks being confused by it but the number of techies who have been grinding their teeth really has me puzzled. Am I alone on this?
In particular, I find it odd that people claim that Win8 is "dumbed down" or "power-user unfriendly". I've found the opposite to be true. The new Explorer UI has things like built-in "Powershell Here", and there's keyboard shortcuts for everything. The Win+X menu is something I constantly reach for whenever I'm on a Win7 box.
Overall, I'm really pretty happy with it. It's not a massive improvement like some previous Windows releases were, but the comparisons to Vista or WinME are nonsense. It's a solid OS, and it really disappoints me that so many are eager to dismiss it for such silly reasons.
I really don't get metro apps (is that what they're called?), maybe if I was on a tablet, but I'm not. Skype in particular was a pain in the ass, until I realised that I could just ignore the metro version and download a classic installer. Other than that, I actually prefer the start screen to the classic start menu, and... not much else has changed.
But I installed Start8 just to try it out, and I do like it better. Its got the fast search of Windows 8, and I find it less distracting than the screen covering start menu.