Yeah. Everyone needs to justify their existence. While quite a lot of people thought Win7 was great and that Microsoft should just stop there, maybe with a few minor improvements (e.g. fix CMD.EXE), they decided to completely change it in response to the tablet "threat".

I have a cheap Win8 tablet. It's weird. Quite slick in a lot of ways, but you can go back to the old UI and see where all the bodges are.