it's really not that bad. In an all-things-equal sense, it's more "intuitive" than Windows 7 -- but sadly, "intuitive" is based on what you already know, and Windows users don't know this touch paradigm. MS should have included a Windows-7-ish UI option. Sometimes I wonder about MS's marketing department. Surely the PMs could have figured out that the "all-in" nature of the product was not going to go over well.

I assume, and hope, that Windows 9 will be to 8.1 what Windows 7 was to Vista.