There's only a handful of people I've spoken to that like Windows 8 and hardly anyone seems to share Microsoft's belief (above).
Meanwhile, Canonical has came along and pretty much came to the same conclusion as Microsoft -- that a common experience across all of one's devices is the way forward. And, just like Microsoft, they apparently fail to realize that nobody wants this but them.
If they ran a restaurant they'd be trying to make a plate/bowl hybrid with a spork holder. So unified!
Imagine if they built cars; the brake pedal would be next to the brake lights.
The fact is, it really didn't work for Apple. Short of a few common design choices, iOS and OSX are very different, and for a good reason. I am not sure why it's not obvious to people. Mouse or keyboard driven UI can be much smaller and tighter, with a lot less chrome, to allow more room for data. Touch UI has to be chunkier by default. The simple truth is Metro UI works amazing on a touch device, I love it. Windows 7 works just fine on PC. What Microsoft really needed is 2 separate operating systems, just like apple. The Windows line could have been updated with a fresh skin, more stability improvements, and some core new features here and there. The Metro OS could have been a separate OS for the Phone, Tablet, and TV markets. Instead Microsoft now has 4 incompatible OS lines which all function very different, but look identical, only adding to the confusion:
1. Windows 8 - For PCs, Tablets, and God knows what else,
2. Windows RT - For Tablets which are not as nice as the Windows 8 tablets but can run some of the same software, but not all of it, and some apps which work on the RT actually do not run on Windows 8 tablets, and, so ..... yeah.
3. Windows Phone 8 - Exclusively for phones. For convenience, incompatible with Windows Phone 7 and 7.5.
4. XBox OS - Runs only on XBox, looks like Windows 8, but works very different.
So, instead of 2 visually distinct operating systems, Microsoft now has 4 visually similar operating systems. I can see their logic, they wanted to leverage their huge PC instal base to drag some users to their Tablet and Phone products. Much like Apple is using iPods to sell people on iPhones and iPads, and perhaps later, Macs. But the problem is, they are not really achieving that goal, while pissing of their core PC customers.
When Apple added touch-sized icons to the Application menu in dock and eventually Launchpad, Microsoft and Canonical saw it and just completely jumped the shark on device/OS convergence. Meanwhile, Apple has tip-toed with the changes, to the point that they're not really moving forward with touch UI on OSX because it seems the value-add is not really clear for the end-user.
Remember that Operating System != GUI.
Actually I think their key argument was that people should be able to develop apps across all these devices using the same APIs and technologies. Same look and feel is just a (unfortunate?) consequence of that.
The idea was that having a unified technology-platform, if people made an "app" for Windows, it would also work on Windows-based tablets and phones. This was Microsoft's attempt at trying to leverage their desktop-dominance into working for their mobile strategy.
If that worked out OK or not can clearly be argued, but the basic premise wasn't all bad. If they had made that work, developers would probably want to create apps for Windows first, instead of iOS or Android.
It's actually a consequence of a strong coupling of GUI and the programs and the unwillingness of developers to refrain from pixel-perfect control. In order to make a program consistent with different interfaces, you need to write them against a "generic" layer. You should declare your screens, menus and visual elements in a GUI-neutral environment and let the specific device use the GUI consistent with it.
In order to make a multi-GUI app you either code for each and every GUI or you give up fine-grained control.
They've taken the worst of WPF (XML) without offering any of the goods (data-binding, rapid application development). You feel like you're back in the stone-age of computing, only this time with XML instead of objects.
This often means you have to do lots of UI-wiring in code indirectly, based on handles, and due to Java's lack of functional constructs, even wiring up a simple event-handler becomes 6 lines of tedious, annoymous class instantiation nonsense. It's horrible.
Had anything like WPF been available in any stable or unstable form, I would have jumped at it in an instant.
Then I got to do some work in WPF and was quite impressed how far the XAML stack has become.
Now if Xamarin cared to support it, it would be great.
Sounds like classic architecture astronaut thinking (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html)
I don't think the concept is flawed. I actually think Metro is the "right answer" for your typical user, with a hidden file system and tiled window management, even on the desktop. However for this to be plausible, you need to be able to ship without the desktop, which means Office needs to be Metro-friendly. The stop-gap of shipping with both Metro and the traditional desktop is a fatal execution flaw in what's otherwise a reasonably sound design.
A better, technically possible, solution would be to open Win32 apps as full screen apps within Metro, and allow the usual tiling and app switching. This is basically how OS X works, and it's very effective and also quite efficient if using a touchpad that allows gestures.