Just move your mouse to the corner of the screen eh? That's great, except for those of us who remote desktop to a windows 8 machine, and now I have to move the mouse to a specific small area of pixels in the corner of a window. This OS was clearly putting the needs of touch interface tablet users over the needs of desktop mouse and keyboard users.
Are you just using the bottom right or top right corner of the screen? there's a bottom left option that makes it a little easier to just click and go. (As opposed to finding the right corner, then scrolling down to the middle. )
Windows 8 no start button is unacceptable, a server OS (2012) that is geared towards touch is absolutely inexcusable.
I can say it's nice to do some server administration from a tablet. The RDP app on Win8 has a few options to ease the touch-based remote issues. Swiping(or left clicking) brings up a button you can use to bring up the server's start menu, rather than trying to dig for pixels. Even when left to mouse/keyboard, the learning curve is steep, but not after a little time and patience. In fact the old arguments against the UI just seem silly afterwards.
My only real complaint with some of the arguments i've seen on tech reporting sites (the worst i've seen being Engadget) is the mentality that anyone who likes the new interface or supports some of the changes being made are shills or completely delusional.
It was an ugly switch at first, but after doing development work for the new platform as a whole, i've come to terms with the fact that the potential in the operating system is incredible. No, it isn't much fun to make the adjustment at first, but that's just the way changes to an OS go. Windows needed touch support to get some sort of foothold in the market. I remember that being a major point of complaint from people after the release of Windows 7. The way Microsoft is handling ecosystem-wide touch integration is the right way to do it for the varying types of consumers they will have.
I can't really see how "Me and 10000+ people don't like the way it looks" is a death sentence argument for the operating system as a whole. At the very least, it is ignorant to use that as the sole reason that the OS is a failure. Improvements under the hood are not an excuse, but a legitimate accomplishment in a new release. It's a shame that Windows is nice and stable now, but most wouldn't know because now there's a new problem to complain about. At the very least, it wouldn't hurt to acknowledge a few things Microsoft has done right without immediately claiming that the company is full of idiots. It does a lot more good to remain respectful in discussing new releases, but the jeering and crude humor seen in comment sections is just embarrassing. Better yet, they take feature suggestions from the MSDN forums all the time. Write up a legitimate idea (Which i've seen fleshed out here more often then there) and they'll actually do something about it.
EDIT: The rant as a whole was way more whiney than it needed to be, but seriously, there's a lot of good ideas floating around Anandtech that could be posted on the MSDN forums, or at least developed by some of the local programmers.