But it wasn't a terrible desktop experience: in 8.1 you had a strongly tiling window manager and a lot of apps designed for phone widths or smaller to tile. The tiling was horizontal only, but you could do a lot on a two widescreen monitor setup.

It moved a lot of cheese, sure, but it wasn't offering as much an "inferior" desktop usage as people seemed to think it did because they never bothered to learn what it did offer new/different/better.