No real horse in this race, I use 7 and love it, no plans on going to 8. What I found a little interesting was the posts with anything remotely negative to say about 8 all seemed to be downvoted - and anything with something positive were voted up. Interesting.
That's because those of us who have tried the OS and bothered to take five minutes to customize it and figure out how to make good use of it realize that it is an improvement over windows 7. I mean, I would take windows 8.1 any day of the week over 7 just because of the massively improved bluetooth.
The people complaining about windows 8 or metro are the ones who obviously either haven't tried the OS or are too lazy to customize it just slightly. If you get rid of Metro apps and just use it to hold your programs, it works wonderfully - the ones that you use frequently, you know exactly where they are... the ones that you don't, press the windows key, type three or four letters, and hit enter.
I don't know about you, but not having to take my hands off the keyboard sure sounds like an improvement to me. Yes you could do that with win 7, but it was much slower and less accurate.