To be fair, people said the same about Gnome 3 and Unity and both work very well...

But... If you are not a "geek-type", what are you doing on "Hacker News"?

I am a geek type, and one who accepts that technology changes and different != automatically awful.

The fact that everyone said the same thing about Unity and are now coming around to it, proves my point. I happen to love Gnome-Shell. I don't mind Unity and I think Win8 is great after you take some time to get used to it.

Your generalizations are incorrect. While a lot of people were very vocal on their opposition to Gnome shell and Unity, I wouldn't say "everyone" opposed them. In fact, I didn't. I considered the move risky, of course.

I think Metro for desktops and notebooks makes very little sense unless you use a multi-touch pointing device like Apple's trackpad. With a mouse, it's painful.

Yes, heh, I did not mean literally everyone, but even much of HN is still full of Unity hate. I managed to get down to at least -8 or -9 by my calculations the other day for trying to combat nonspecific Unity hate-rants. I understand skepticism, like I said, I really just roll my eyes at the "it sucks [with no reasons]" that are evident even in this thread.

And it doesn't completely answer your criticism but many Synaptic touchpads for a looong time are multitouch capable, they're just not utilized. It's different, I'll grant that, I didn't think it was painful, but I adapt quickly and I don't mind scrolling with the wheel to move horizontally. (The proverbial) You get used to it.