I took a look at the Windows 8 "developer preview" yesterday. Not surprisingly, I found it quite cumbersome and annoying. Once again, Microsoft has built something that is more suited to their marketplace goals than to the needs of the end user. Having failed for years to sell anyone a phone that looks like the Windows desktop, Microsoft will now make the Windows desktop look like their phone. It's backwards but that's Microsoft for you.
By now you have probably heard Microsoft say that everything is now going to be a "Metro style" app (in other words, a Windows Phone app) and that the "classic" desktop is still there if you need it. Upon trying out Windows 8, one quickly realizes that this is somewhat disingenuous. The desktop is still there, and it still works exactly the way it did before. What they've actually done is replaced the Start menu with a Windows Phone ("Metro") environment. When you first boot up, you will see Windows Phone.
If you select a "regular" Windows application, it switches you over to the desktop, which behaves exactly the way it did in Windows 7. But once inside the desktop, if you click the Start menu, instead of seeing the Start menu appear, it switches the whole screen back to the Windows Phone interface.
Most of the "tiles" in the developer preview are mockups. They don't do anything on-screen, and they don't do anything when you click them. However, it makes Microsoft's intentions clear: they are going to force Windows Phone down the throats of Windows PC users everywhere, similar to the way they enslaved Windows 98 users to Internet Explorer with the "Active Desktop" design that everyone hated (especially Netscape users). And of course, the fact that most of these "tiles" lead to Bing destinations, demonstrates that Microsoft's first priority with Windows 8 is to "kill Google" and "kill Android." The entire user interface is designed around the concept of putting as many clicks as possible between the user and a Google destination, while providing as many Bing-based detours as possible along the way.
You may have also heard Microsoft talk about how Windows 8 will run on both Intel-86 and ARM processors. This is true, but only if you write "Metro style" apps. In other words, if you write only to the new API's (yes, Microsoft has once again provided you with The API To End All API's, And This Time We Really Mean It) then your program will run on Windows 8 Intel and Windows 8 ARM (and perhaps on Windows Phone, who knows), but not on Windows 7 or Windows Vista or Windows XP, etc. Microsoft will be fighting against the very legacy that has kept its desktop monopoly in place all these years. Are developers going to write Metro apps, or are they going to write software that runs on all versions of Windows? Are consumers going to buy ARM devices that won't run their existing Intel-86 Windows software?
Conclusion: Windows 8 as it currently stands is half-baked, misdirected, and annoying. Of course, this could also be said for most of Microsoft's existing products.