I haven’t spent that much time on N5.x in Win 8, but I’ve spent some time doing casual computing tasks on it. It’s not that bad. My only complaint really is that my laptop in particular has touch gestures on the touch pad which allows me to side-swipe to bring up the Start Page or the Charms Bar (or whatever it’s called), and I end up doing this by mistake at times. But that’s an issue with the implementationon the laptop, not the OS.
So far absolutely none of the complaints that people had has been bothering me. As I suspected they were in my opinion super-overrated. The Start Page is simply the Start Menu but with “live” buttons to click, or “tiles” as they’re called now. It takes one click to get to it, just as with the Start Menu. Similarly opening an app, or searching for it, takes the same amount of time.
I spend most my time on the desktop so I really don’t notice the difference much. That said though the Start Page looks nice to me. You can group your apps any way you like and if you don’t want to spend time in a desktop environment you can instead use the apps. It’s a personal preference thing. I also don’t spend much time using Device Manager etc, but it’s readily available.
All in all I’d say that I’d never not buy a computer because it has Win 8, but I’d also not go out of my way to get it for the purpose of a DAW. Lastly, I really do think they have a winning concept simply because it’ll translate well to tablets and phones.