Having played around with it for a while I'm actually impressed with it. It ran just fine in a virtual machine on my 4 year old iMac and I don't mind the interface at all. It's not the most attractive thing I've ever seen, but I think the UI is a step in the right direction. I'm not really sure why people are so married to the start menu, because I think it's been long due for replacement.
The biggest problem in my mind is that Windows 8 feels like 2 operating systems stuck together with the desktop and the Metro UI. The most noticeable part of this was having 2 drastically different looking Internet Explorers depending on where you launched the program from. That seemed odd to me. I do wonder if they should've had the desktop visible behind the tiled UI so they'd feel more connected. Then it could've been simply a more elegant and useful start menu.
As it is, the desktop environment almost feels like a virtual machine running an older windows. I'm sure after using it for a while it wouldn't seem that way, but it was something I noticed at first. When using the full screen programs (News, Sports, etc.) it felt more like using a kiosk at a museum or something than a personal computer. They were nice looking, but again it felt jarring to go from that to the old Windows desktop environment.
All in all it seems pretty solid and I hope people will get used to the lack of a start menu. It was a great way to navigate when we had 800X600 resolution, but there are other ways to do things now.
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