Nope, don't get it wrong: it is "people who don't have a tablet/smartphone+PC" that is in a shrinking minority group, it's MS research, not my idea. Also: 1. Metro is for touch mons - wrong, it's as good for mouse as with touch, like I said before, metro provides a unified home screen for the devices, it's not a touch-oriented feature. Actually Android is a touch-oriented OS, but I can use the android X86 smoothly with mouse. 2. People says metro means MS is going to kill desktop, wrong. MS's bread and butter is the volume customers, and these customers uses (almost)entirely desktops with multi-tasking and multi-window.
Surprisingly their "fix" for mouse activation Charms is to place all the elements slightly more UP/DOWN depending on where you activate, not much of a change but at least something.
You Think Microsoft you ? IMO 'Start Button' never returned and never will and that means the button that opens Start Menu. In Windows 8.1 that 'thing' is Officially known as "Start Tip" as its purpose is tipping start screen or all apps screen. well MS says they responded user feedback by giving Start Tip, so some users either wanted this exactly and they are happy to see this or if they wanted start menu they keep saying it start button and MS doesn't know any word like Start Button, all they know is Start Tip. Conclusion: For those who are happy with this be happy, for those want Start Menu, 3rd party programs will be ready for you.
RTM is when the final build is compiled(for windows 8 this actually was August 1, 2012), after that the build gets distributed to OEMs and it becomes available on MSDN/Technet(Win 8: August 15). Several moths later there's General Availability (GA), for Windows 8 this was October 26, 2012. Now that I've thought about these facts, the August 1 date for 8.1 RTM sounds probable, but I still don't think that Thurrot is distributing valuable information here, he's just joking about Windows 8.1 - 8/1/'13 afaik.
based on the assumption that MS is about to do a similar updating cycle like the fruit company does, it might be quite logical that they start to issue their new system upgrade on a yearly schedule beginning Aug 1st, for OEMs first and a defined waiting period later for the public like Oct 26. To me it sounds quite simple. One is for sure: The gap between preview June 26 and RTM in August is close
Let's just hope the Windows 8.1 RTM leaks ahead of the official release date like Windows 8 did last year