Or just go to the bottom right corner of the screen, wait for the charms bar to pop up, click the Preferences icon then shutdown. Which still doesn't make a lot of sense, but is simpler than what you described.
Beyond that, Metro is horrible when you have more than one large monitor. The UI simple doesn't scale well in that environment. It looks like 8.1 update 1 will finally be much closer to how it should have been.
It reminds me of Vista, where half the control panel UI was updated, and half wasn't, and it was just a bad mix of old/new. I don't mind a new UI. For that matter, I'm really digging Ubuntu's Unity interface, ymmv on that.
I think that Windows 7 had a really nice UI, and that metro should have been an option on top of that from the beginning. Trying to make a unifying UX for interfaces from your phone to tablet to dual-monitor desktops just doesn't work that well. You really need two options, and making the UI work for those metro apps in the desktop context makes more sense.
And the Server 2012 R2 upgrade was not free unlike Win8.1. While at it, don't forget the lack of IE11 too.
Disclaimer: MSFT employee, opinions my own.
I'm actually really confused why this is, it seems to be such an important use case. I would not be surprised if they didn't even test WS2012.
Before opening the connection, click "Show options" -> Local Resources tab -> Apply Windows key combinations.
There are a lot of things about Metro that I dislike, but killing the "don't touch the power button on a computer" idiom is one that I do like.
No it doesn't. Pressing the power button implements what the PC maker wants to implement. In many cases (especially on laptops) it's for the computer to go to sleep.