I used it in a pretty limited and less typical fashion, however. I did some development to port an AIR/AS application written on OSX to Windows. (We needed a native installer and creating a Windows installer required the Windows SDK, and WORA is always a lie, so extra dev was required. So instead of requisitioning a Windows box, I thought I'd try out Microsoft's latest and greatest for free.) Edit: Also had to do some Java development, same setup, different command-line SDK.
I used little more than TextPad and the command prompt (free version of SDK = no IDE), and didn't really use the Metro apps much. Except maybe IE to search for stuff. So I did spend more time in the desktop view. However, the time I spent on Metro was definitely enjoyable.
Another thing that impressed me was that it was still pretty smooth despite running in a VM on a pretty underpowered Mac Mini. It was nowhere as smooth as the Ubuntu VM I also had, but I expected W8 to be significantly more bloated.