I don’t think anyone doubts that Win8 is going to be a significant change over Win7. That’s not the question. The real issue is whether or not that change will be a good thing for the end user.
For the hobbyist who wants the latest and greatest.. probably a good thing without question. For the corporate environment who sees “major change” and reads it as “costly training”, maybe not so much. For the average home user, somewhere inbetween.
Of course, having observed tech punditry for the last couple of decades, the safest prediction I can make is that most of the pundits are probably wrong, and that we won’t have any good idea what will happen (in terms of success/failure as measure by actual end users) until it actually happens.
when the money decider is able to have a desk sized screen on their desk survace like an ink blotter then it will really get interesting.