The difference between the two environments, at least on the desktop, is jarring. As the author points out, on the Metro side, the desktop is just another tile. Strange.
And on the desktop side, they've removed the start button, so the taskbar looks incomplete. To go to the start screen, you either need to move your mouse to the bottom left corner to reveal the start screen icon as a hover/tooltip sort of element, or the bottom right corner, which brings up the charms bar with the start button. In both cases, it's move/hover/click. In both cases, not self evident (like a button!?) and not super discoverable. This makes more sense on a touch device but it's not so great for mousers (e.g., the people who will run the desktop version in the early days, a.k.a nearly everyone).
I'm guessing (and hoping) that they have a new alternative to the classic start button planned for a final reveal in RTM that will take you directly to the start screen.
It'll be interesting to see how this is solved over time. I imagine Windows 9 will have most of the usability issues solved. In the meantime...
I haven't tested Windows 8 yet myself, but I've tested Ubuntu, which I found quite frustrating getting to know it, being a "Windows user" and all. In contrast I found Linux Mint much more natural to use and even more intuitive than Windows 7 in general.
So watching the video below, it made me think that Windows 8 is going to be a lot more frustrating to get to know for Windows users even than Ubuntu, which is a huge problem, and could make Windows 8 a bigger failure than Vista, which at least was somewhat like XP:
Aside from some pretty colors, and a couple of improved designs (like the Control Panel one), there are a lot of UI inconsistencies and putting things that aren't compatible together ... like a horizontal scrollbar for the tile interface (really?), making a "pop-up window" show up *on top" of the "Shutdown" tile, which makes no sense to me, the charms don't seem very useful, and I bet most "Metro apps" will ruin the homescreen "prettyness" with all sorts of crazy graphics to draw your eye towards their app. Right now it's all preset by Microsoft, so you won't realize that until it's out and you have it.
And on the desktop side, they've removed the start button, so the taskbar looks incomplete. To go to the start screen, you either need to move your mouse to the bottom left corner to reveal the start screen icon as a hover/tooltip sort of element, or the bottom right corner, which brings up the charms bar with the start button. In both cases, it's move/hover/click. In both cases, not self evident (like a button!?) and not super discoverable. This makes more sense on a touch device but it's not so great for mousers (e.g., the people who will run the desktop version in the early days, a.k.a nearly everyone).
I'm guessing (and hoping) that they have a new alternative to the classic start button planned for a final reveal in RTM that will take you directly to the start screen.
It'll be interesting to see how this is solved over time. I imagine Windows 9 will have most of the usability issues solved. In the meantime...