"Like any change e.g. when the first spinning Jenny's became available, people rioted."
To me, FWIW, a lot of the reason many people get upset is the hype around the whole thing, the "tablets are the future" line & the ads you see everywhere, together with MS removing the Start Menu saying you Have to use the touchscreen interface. When cars came onto the scene, or the telegraph, or computers, they did stuff that couldn't be done previously, but they also performed the same job as whatever they replaced, e.g. in the US the telegraph came & the Pony Express went away, or I remember my 1st scientific calculator that made slide rules obsolete. Saying that tablets [&/or the win8 tablet interface] are The Future for PCs/laptops is like saying microwave ovens will replace the stove -- been decades since the 1st microwaves & it hasn't happened yet. :)
"The computer boots up almost instantaneously and programs that ran sluggish before now run as slick as a hot knife through butter."
As hotdoge3 pointed out re: start times, MS folks have written that there's not much of anything they could improve on over win7, so they focused on putting the system to sleep instead of a shut-down -- it's actually a slight bit more work to shut down win8 rather than put it to sleep, which is I expect what's happening [i.e. sleep] when/if win8 starts almost instantly.
Far as performance goes, no one's found win8 to be more than slightly faster than win7, & running the same apps on the same PC in XP Pro 32 or win7 64, most apps run the same -- when win7 adds no speed boost, the boost from XP to win8 is slight as well. If/when win8 makes it seem like a new PC/laptop again, it's not win8 but the state of the old Windows install -- win8 didn't fix anything that re-installing the old version wouldn't have fixed.
"I hope someone creates a program that adds aero back a si've always like the look."
Google on "win8 aero" [without quotes].
Not trying to rain on anyone's parade [except maybe Ballmer's], I'm all for giving win8 a try, but it really is more evolution than revolution when compared to win7. And just like in the physical world, where not all of the mutations leading to an evolutionary step are useful, win8's made some wrong turns. Time will tell if it goes the way of the Dodo & faces extinction.
