I have been running Windows 8 now for 2 days almost.. and it does not suck.. far far from it.
It is fast as hell for one. Never thought my SSD OS could start faster than the 10 seconds it did under Windows 7... well it can. And shutting down is almost instant now. There seems to be SSD improvements in Windows 8, since my SSDs Windows Experience Points went from 7.8 to 8.1.
There is 99% compatibility with programs.. apps for you mac users.. and those that are not compatible, well either they are ancient or there is a windows 8 compatible version. My anti-virus for example did not work, but of course via the Microsoft Store I could get a new compatible version.
For years I have never really used the Start button, only for minor things. I had made shortcuts on my desktop or on the taskbar. Now that has changed.. the Start menu/page in Windows 8 is brilliant and very interactive. I dont have to launch my mail program to see if there are new mails... it tells me when they come in. I now have a combined contacts list across different services, instead of having to run several programs or webpages. Saves time and energy. The list of improvements goes on and on in my opinion. And as a bonus, my desktop is now clean and I can actually see the picture I have there...
Now there are a few negative sides of course.. no new OS is bug free... Mac OS and iOS users can confirm that. But so far the bugs I have found are minor and not OS breaking in any way and often can be bypassed or tweaked so they are not a problem. There have been no WPA bug that prevents wireless logging on, wireless signal dropping, no security holes out of the box I am aware off and from what I can see on laptops running this OS.. no battery draining problems .. unlike on another recent OS launch.. cough Apple.. cough.
I did found a bug with my outlook.com account and the people app.. one that Microsoft is aware off and looking into... and to fix that, I just reverted my outlook.com account back to a hotmail.com and voila it was fixed. Not that I will ever need to access hotmail.com anymore (unless it is on another PC... which I wont since I dont use it that much), since the mail app is simple to use and meets my needs for most things... and I can have multiple email accounts, which is nice.
One thing that pisses me off a bit, was that it was only the US that got free commercial paid Xbox Music access... booooooooo.. the rest of the world can only get 30 days free and then we have to pay.. /rude. Had really looked forward to that service sigh.
But every day I get deeper into the OS and find new tweaks and gems and time will only tell if it is a hit or miss.. but from the reports I have seen, this might just be the fast selling OS of all time.. which is impressive. I am actually thinking of buying an Xbox so that I can use Smartglass with my Android phone and tablet.... it is such a cool feature.
So ... Windows 8 does not suck..... Apple OSX and iOS does however! Apple is the evil empire!