Purely anecdotal, but I'm currently in the market to replace my now 4 year old laptop. My problem? The top of the line laptops do not have touch screens. If I want to have a touch screen I have to settle for compromises elsewhere. It seems, a high resolution touch screen is a hard thing to do. If I buy a laptop now I will actually have to accept a downgrade over my 4 year old laptop. Even if it's not a real issue, psychologically that is very hard to do. So I wait. I think a lot of other people are waiting too - first they waited for RT, then they waited for the Surface Pro, and now we're all waiting for better laptops.

I think this is only one factor that's problematic for Win8. Another is that it now as a touch-first OS, looks and feels like it is competing with the iPad. So perversely, MS may have opened themselves to even worse competition with tablets because they have conflated the desktop and tablet ecosystems together. Instead of people buying a laptop when they need laptop and a tablet when they need a tablet, MS seems to be saying "Hey, you think you need a laptop, but maybe you actually need a tablet?". This is so confusing. People don't know what Windows really is any more. So they either wait, or they buy the less confusing option, which turns out to be the tablet.