It really is not that steep of a learning curve.
The desktop is still there. It is one click or enter key press away.
Furthermore, any company with over 100 pc's should be applying images to their desktops so pinning the most commonly used applications to the taskbar and/or creating tiles should be part of the image.
That being said, my company will not upgrade to Win 8 any time soon. We will stick to 7. It will remain in extended support until 2020.