I auditioned it, same as you. I installed it onto a Win7 compliant laptop with touchscreen. The Win8 touchscreen drivers weren’t compliant. Tactile manipulation is the whole reason for Win8 so that was 9 out of 10 strikes right there.
Then I ran into this registration thingy. Not registering the OS but associating an email account with the machine. I prefer my privacy and this was just a test so I declined to fill out the form. Since Win8 is so browser-centric it seemed like everything that I wanted to test drive was disabled.
Coupled with the concealment of most of the functionality of the Control Panel and the irritation of the lack of a Start button, I shut it down and haven’t gone back to it.
Two steps forward and eight steps back IMO.
My laptop isn’t a touchscreen so the functionality was useless until I figured out how to rearrange icons to get the ones I use all on the initial boot screen. Software I installed had icons placed on the initial boot screen, but not on the desktop. So, if I was working on the desktop, I’d have to go back to the overlay to open a program (even Office 2010). Not very thoughtful...
It boots and runs fast. Programs open quickly, and it seemed stable, except for a problem I ran in to after a couple weeks. It didn’t want to shut down properly, sometimes hanging up. I’d get a message about there not being a disc in an external drive. Come to find out, it was referring to the SD slot on my laptop that had the fake card inserted in it (came that way from Dell). Once I put a real SD card into the slot all was well. I discovered that through a Google search for Win8 shutdown issues. I wasn’t alone in that problem.
So, some good, some not so good. Being that it can be bought for $40 or so, I just might do that. But if it were more expensive, forget it.