It's all well and good that Microsoft is looking into the future but I think they have focused too much on combining desktop with mobile with the emphasis on the latter. When Vista was released it showed a lack of pre-developement and as you poimted out, the first versions were cumbersom and memory heavy. They could have carried on and called Windows 7 an upgrade of Vista but the general consensus was Vista was and always will be one of the worst operating systems by Microsoft so they had to drop the entire project and introduce a very similar but more robust and stable version with a new name Windows 7. This has proved more popular and is growing substantialy from XP upgraders which I am one. I have run Windows 7 since its first appearance and it has fulfilled my needs in both 64 and 32 bit versions. I did try the first Wndows 8 publication and was immediately totally disappointed with the Metro interface on a desktop where most of my work is carried out. I felt it was too focused on touch screens and tablets with desktops as an after thought. I read all the time about the various tablets being developed and introduced with a lot of the media saying this marks the end of the desktop as a result but my tablet is used very much like my smartphone which I consider as add-ons to my desktop which is the centre piece and the current software works well enough together for my needs.
So the bottom line to all this is do I need to spend more money upgrading to an operating system which is not compatible with my requirements or setup? From my own experience has very little to offer any form of enhancements to a desktop over Windows 7. The current market already shows that Android and IOS can intergrate with Windows well enough to carry out most of the requirements. Windows 8 should have been developed as a pure mobile to compete with the current tablet systems on offer and not the messy dual purpose thing it is now. They should have developed it along side Windows 7 and slowly intergrated it with upgrades when they got a response from the market as to what the people realy wanted. So for me Windows 8 is a none starter and I will wait for Windows 9 just as I did with Vista.