Hey, it’s probably the Win8 “metro” GUI interface your friends are having some bad feelings about. I must also admit, that it has irritated me a lot in the beginning, when I went from Win7 to 8. The Metro interface is the “touch” interface (for phones, tablets), but can also be used with a normal desktop mouse. Metro is the new “start button”. But it’s made like a layer over the normal desktop background. And every time you load a program, for example Cubase, you automatically switch to the good old desktop. A little confusing at first, but you get used to it. Tons of people has probably been frustrated about metro, and the way it works, so now MS is soon releasing a new Win8.1 update, that should make the old start button appear again, as we normally know. All fine by me 
Cubase is working without a single problem here on windows 8. If you’re upgrading from XP to Windows 8, there are more things to look out for. You need to make sure, that you have win7 or 8 64bit drivers for all your hardware in your computer. This is important. Also, if you wanna go full 64bit, or stay with 32bit, or maybe a combination. 64bit will give access to more than 4GB mem. 32bit is max 4GB.
SLL