I think the only legit beef was having it boot to the Start screen by default, an issue that they were pretty quick to fix. Booting to the Metro interface is fine for tablets but stupid for laptops & desktops. The only other issues I had were that Firefox wasn’t playing nice with it (solved by installing Waterfox, a 64-bit Firefox build) and I had to hunt around to get at some of the settings. But as you said, a lot of people panic over the slightest change.
Yeah, I could see why that would be offsetting, but really, a simple "CTRL/ESC" works wonders. Maybe since I had read the reviews, and other articles, on it I knew what to expect.
hmmm, never tried Waterfox, guess I will look into it.