I too have been using Windows 8 since the Developers Preview and now the Consumer Preview. I have partitioned my hard drive to dual boot either Win7 or Win8 and this has worked great for me. For the most part I like the improvements Microsoft has made to the OS but I would make some changes if I could. At this point I too skip metro (mostly) and move straight to the desktop.

From what I've read, I really don't expect much more in the Release Preview for the desktop. However, I do expect to see significant improvements in the Metro APPS. I do agree with you that the metro apps don't have much going on at this stage. They appear to be mostly consumption oriented and are very much beta software. Even some don't work much at all. For the desktop, I do like the ability to search more categories in the system, however, I haven't figured out is how to default search to 'files' or a combination of areas rather than 'apps'. A change there would be nice but I'm not expecting it. I am also disappointed in what I'm hearing about "Windows-to-go". I was hoping to be able to use that feature in the Pro version (at home) but it looks like it will only be available in the Enterprise edition. I'm also hearing that the Window-RT (WOA) will not be any easier than an IPAD to manage in the Enterprise. That would be disappointing, but I'm not clear if that's totally true at this point.
I've been a long time Microsoft fan, but there have been products which they start and then abandon after some time even though there is seems to be value in them. Just one simple example is Microsoft Money.
I'm expecting that Microsoft and Windows 8 will be a success.