Having tested both previews for 8 and 8.1 I didn't notice much if any difference John, maybe a few milliseconds faster on bootup which as I use SSD's is not worth the additional expense of win8 until its needed. It works Ok even if it does remind me of AOL's walled Garden setup, it's not what I'd call a very well thought out or aesthetically pleasing interface, however most people don't sit looking at the Startup screen or desktop all day. There are some pretty odd desktops appearing in Linux these days as well which are getting increasingly over complicated to customise.
For Metro haters there are some powershell scripts which will completely and permanently remove all the builtin MS stuff or selectively get rid of some of it apart from the Microsoft shop thing, if you don't want or use it and reclaim some disk space. Plus there are 1001 tips and customisations you can mess around with. As with all operating systems you can tweak it to suit your own requirements. Just because it looks weird doesn't mean it won't work well.
Curiously one of my acquaintances, who recently went from XP to Win8, saw my Win7 and wanted to know what OS it was, " What's that is it Linux?" No I said it's Windows 7, "Oh, it looks much better than Windows 8" was the reply.