Metro is a fantastic design language. What they screwed up is the combined Metro+classic desktop in Win8. A Surface 2's UI is great (the problem is the lack of apps), same for WP.
On my new Win8 machine the first program I installed was Classic Shell [1]. Now I have a (functioning) start button and it boots straight to the desktop so I never have to see the touch interface.
But I agree, on a tablet, Metro is great.
The problem is that full, complete, design orientation doesn't give you enough clues to accomplish tasks. Maybe no one ever cares to accomplish anything on a tablet but if they do, it doesn't seem like Metro will be helpful.
I mean, the problem with the Metro start button isn't that it's touch oriented - you can click the tiles with a mouse just as easily. The problem is you look at the start button and say "beautiful - WTF is it?" If you just feel like experiencing an endless beautiful demo, it's great but if you have a goal, it's opaque how you'd achieve it.
Design is a specification of an object, manifested by an agent, intended to accomplish goals, in a particular environment, using a set of primitive components, satisfying a set of requirements, subject to constraints;
For my usage it would be been quite fine if the old desktop apps could run as Metro apps. I really liked how the splitting of the screen between multiple Metro apps worked in Windows 8.1. It was easier to use the screen efficiently than with traditional desktop windows.
Did you never take advantage of Aero Snap in Windows 7? It's far more useful and versatile than the limit multitasking of Metro in Windows 8.
While paging from the side or a slide in is cool they decided to go with an infinite side scrolling paper thing. Real bitch to read like that. The newsapp is a perfect example of that annoying hard to track with your eyes side scrolling that would be a 1000 times better if it either scrolled vertically or just paged.