That is one of the things I love about Windows 8.....you get 5 GB free Skydrive space. More if you buy Office 2013.
Your Skydrive is in your folder, like a local drive.
You can access your files from any computer, even if it does not have Office on it.
How does this differ from DropBox, which has been around for several years, enables private storage, sharing peer to peer with prior user approval and provides notification of modification to all users, or entirely public files?
DropBox is available for free to anyone, no need for Windows 8. Works just fine on XP, icon right on the desktop if you want.
You can also synch your Skydrive folder among multiple computers. MS has had the service for years now in several versions (livesynch, livemesh, etc) and it’s always been free.