Personal experience has given me the most obvious answer: No.
Windows 8 is a catastrophe in that it is this annoying mish mash of both the standard desktop that everyone will use, and a crummy minimalist-based touch screen setup that will attempt to strip some need of a physical mouse.
It's mostly something to compete actively with Apple's iPad, or Android tablets. In a lot of ways, that's acceptable. I understand it from the perspective that Windows has much more software available than iOS or Android could ever present, but from a more extensive standpoint, most notably, gamers, it is far from fitting in.
They've made a move as every other has, which is go about implementing the constant networking thing. Tendency is if you have an Android or iPad, you probably bought a model with 3G+ support. You've probably interconnected your social networks among others to it for constant information. This means Microsoft just HAD to jump in, thus, Windows Live accounts should be synced up. Doing this also links your Xbox Live profile (if you have it) to support the Xbox Games app (built to replace Games For Windows Live).
From my time with the Developer Preview, I saw some functionality with the Music and Video apps on the Metro Start that kinda helps and kinda harms. They only read files that were directly inside their respective folders. This seemed to be something of a hassle when I attempted to get it to read my music out of my iTunes folder, but fortunately didn't have the fault that Media Center had of reading practically the entire computer and possibly dropping in some of my more risque videos in the library.
Software compatibility was, of course, varied. A lot of software seems to scan on installation by what build number you have and whether your OS is x86 or x64. Unfortunately, Windows 8 hits the build count over 8k, thus the range for a lot of software would read it and either say "Your installation isn't supported. Are you sure to wish to install this" or "your installation isn't supported. Aborting." I'm willing to bet that was an easy fix with changing a few variables in the system registry, but I was unaware of it at the time.
Dev Preview, I saw... somewhat improved performance in my games as opposed to Windows 7. I got more FPS than I usually would. It kind of scared me. Then Consumer Preview came and...
this happened. I then said, "Fuck you, Microsoft," and went about trying to fix my broken Windows 7 install.
In short, Windows 8 was okay with Developer Preview, Consumer Preview seemed like they took 1 step forward and 2 steps back. I don't see it being all that popular. The chances of it fighting back at Apple's iPad might go in it's favor just because I can see these "ultrabooks" that'll run it being more affordable, but that's probably all that will help it.
