My impression of Windows 8 (for most use cases at least) has always been that it's essentially Win7 with the beginnings of some "transitional" stuff tacked on. Still, they are mostly unobtrusive unless you never moved away from the old "drill down through menus" method of launching programs from the Start menu. Vista introduced a search function (to finally catch up with OSX's Spotlight) that made finding and opening programs or files much faster. Then 7 combined the quick launch bar and the taskbar to include pinning common apps to the bottom of your screen (more like the OSX dock). So between launching 90% of your programs from the taskbar and search&query for the rest, the Start menu was mostly legacy...

...but with Win8 I've learned just how many people never stopped doing things the old way. Does a full-screen Start make sense? Not particularly. But if you're just hitting the Windows key and typing the name of what you're looking for, you only see it for a few seconds. And while you're looking at the search results, you aren't really working actively on what's in your other running apps. Otherwise, you never really see it if you don't want to use it.

I'm glad 10 has shrunk Start back down because my minor complaint has always been that the full screen Start was just a little "jarring" but that's about it. If nothing else, it will make the old school Start menu die hards (read: the faculty I deal with) happier I guess.

> But if you're just hitting the Windows key and typing the name of what you're looking for, you only see it for a few seconds.

Which I'm probably not doing if I'm going from one program with a WIMP-optimized interface to another program with a WIMP-optimized interface; context-switching to keyboard-driven mode is a bigger UX loss than the start screen is there.