I just don't understand why MS could've just made two separate OSes. The experience I've had with Windows 8 on a laptop and a tablet is night and day. MS's unification vision is going to make Windows 9 part bloatware because much of the features will be useless for certain types of hardware. I'm still excited to see how Windows 9 will turn out. Maybe MS will pull if off well, but their lack of sense of practicality may break their streak of having every other Windows very good.

The search in Windows 8 is just plain great. I want to find an app I dont use much. I simply hit start and type a few letters and find it nearly immediatly rather then navigate through menus starting at start menu.  Windows 8 is also more stable. Other things like copying files are faster. Explorer is also easier to navigate for commands you dont use much with the ribbon. There are many other improvements over 7, but if the only thing you care about is the Start Menu then I can see your issue. To me the start menu is a relic of the past that I have never missed.

are you calling me a liar because..

i also dont' feel the need to spin doctor a bad product into a good one.

i tried but the download was around 8 hours and kept crashing part way through and couldn't recover (aka made me restart from the begining).  after the 4th failed attempt i gave up caring.  i've since bought an ipad for my casual web browsing and don't much care to turn on the laptop anymore.  really just use it to download the pictures off my wife's digital SLR these days.

I hope so.

I love the new Microsoft ecosystem. Is just the best in the market.

I don't like the actual desktop idea, hope they kill it on Windows 9.

That start screen is really sad. You don't know how to use Windows 8.

Unless they recognize the differences between platforms, this will result in a catastrophe. Windows Phone isn't doing all that well, and Xbox can only grow so much before it runs out of space. And this direction isn't exactly in favor of their PC side, which I imagine is much bigger than WP or Xbox, so this could end very badly. There's a reason W8 more or less failed, and that reason isn't because it wasn't unified with the other MS platforms.

And I just ordered a Windows 8 PC.
I can never be modern T-T

Hopefully this will be really good and significantly better than Windows 8 both commercially and critically. Id like to upgrade from Windows 7 to something better one day.

Can't be worse than Vista and baseline Windows 8.
But I still think it may be a mistake to ignore the differences in form and usage type amongst all the different computing devices. There's a reason we use a laptop for one thing and a phone for another, and it may be more beneficial for an OS to be built around that, rather than perhaps being a jack of all trades but master of none for every device you own.