Look at a certain way you could consider a unicycle progress over a bike. After all it requires less materials to build, takes up less space and is different looking...but that dont mean its necessarily is true progress.
Remembering the name of a program that you haven't used in a couple months, then removing your hand from the mouse to type it in, then putting your hand back on the mouse to select the RIGHT program out of a list of possibles it will find.....vs scroll and click. Yeah I'll take that bet. Taksbar is for the few programs you USE on a regular basis. The start menu is for all the rest that are needed but not used on a daily basis.
Honestly, *nix dweebs are a bunch of elitist asshats. A pc is a tool. The easier and more efficient the tool...the better it is. Everything else is dick beating. So thats no true argument you are making...and this is coming from someone whose been with computers since before Windows was the defacto std.
Win 8 has GOOD things about it....but it has been hobbled by a crap interface. Its 'change' for the sake of change. That is NOT progress. THe OS should be customizable and accommodate the needs of the user. The user should not need to change in order to accommodate the OS. Some people with like the full screen bollocks BS. Most will not. Its not that hard to give the option of having it do one or the other....MS are just being lazy.
If only that was the issue. M$ is not being lazy by not including the option to opt-out of the metro interface, it's a concious business decision on their part in an attempt to force adoption of their new "one OS to rule them all" philosophy. Pretty much in line with the old joke about misspelling a word in the "new" windows interface and the answer from management isn't to fix the mistake, but instead to use their market power to force adoption of the new spelling.
And no, I won't be using stardock for start menu fuctionality. Third party apps for basic functions of an OS tend to get broken during updates fairly regularily either by accident or by design. Just like I switched over to openoffice when they made the MS Office interface less intuitive, I'll either be running win7 forever, or looking at linux + wine for gaming rather than accepting win8 in it's current form (I'd be doing that now if I knew that gpu folding was fairly easy under linux).