I quite agree with you in your view. But, as much as the transition process from desktop to touchscreens(tablets, ultrabooks and Windows Phones) is not difficult makes it a very good to embrace it. It doesn't require much from the kids to make use of it. There is lot it offer on the kids corner for seamless education and games purposes more than the desktop environment. I think the more people realize those the more they'll patronize the use. The reason why android is seen as good from that perspective, as to my little observation, is the icons are of regular shapes found in products instead of tiles. Indeed, the tiles distinguish Windows from the rest in that capacity. And, even in functionality there is nothing much to say about Android having the best. We have to wait and see what Windows have to offer in the apps area in the future. The Windows modern UI is a new feature and it is not expected to be perfect at this early stage.
I'm not saying that metro is best but desktop is too complex to use for a normal user. Take an example.How do you install a desktop app ? From developer's site ? DVD? How do you open an app ? From desktop shortcut? What if app it self don't create shortcuts ? How do you delete an app ? By deleting app folder from program files ? By deleting registries ? There's no any Universal method for doing this. That's where modern apps come. only one standard way to install, open and delete. They share common UI across them. And this all things are not for 10s of thousands of tech experts talking about software but its about 1.5 billion Windows users using Windows in their day to day life. They don't want visual studio running next to emulator. What they want is facebook chat while surfing internet or watching movie. Once again I'm not saying metro is the best thing. But Microsoft is improving Metro and we all can see this in leaked builds.
Looks like they optimized it that far that it's not present in Desktop Installs of comming builds . Even the worst noob among my friends is able to install common desktop programs and also finds them on desktop or in Start Menu ... not to mention all Win 8/8.x users of them use a Start Menu Replacement (although they might play crappy games in their desktop browser).
I know most people can do that but How about improving things, being modern , making things consistence. That's the big deal., consistent UI across all apps.
There's consistence ... ... you must show me . That UI might be nice on a 10'' tablet device, on a desktop multi-monitor setup it makes absolutely no sense. I'm using inverted Windows Theme (dark backgrounds with light text color) and starting any Modern-UI app is like switching on an additional lamp due to lots of white space with a few info chunks.
Looks like someone will be disappointed by today's news. Windows vNext Tech preview event confirmed by Microsoft to be September 30. Looks like my guess of invites going out September 16 wasn't that far off either.
The problem is that it's just not polished for all different kinds of viewing devices. Like you said, it might look good on the 10" tablet. They spent so much time on their dpi scaling and such that they never tested it with people to see if they got it right. Maybe they did. *shrug* The problem with trying to put all of the information on the button instead of below the icon, is that you can only put so much info. The smaller the buttons get, the less info you can put.
The September 30th date, has long been reported by multiple news outlets. Just because you don't see a press release by MS, doesn't mean it's not going to happen.
It's an invitation-only event. Why bother with an official press release? Those who are invited are all notified by mail.
My anticipation is that the event might be done in close door without having the general public in mind. Perhaps, the news outlet, online tech blogs, websites and forums will be the ones to tell us about it later in the day. Seriously, I am expecting livestream of the event.
Lol... We still have 15 days to go. That's enough time for those willing to provide the leaks to do so. WZor might fail in his prediction this time around. I am keeping my fingers crossed for the moment.