Which only early-adopters and the techy side of the population would even remotely consider using, yes.
It doesn't count. At all. It was a "be nice to developers and crowd-source the bug-hunting" gesture, not a "lets get everyone in the world to try Win8 for free!" one.
I kind of have to take issue with this one... They handed out the pre-release version of Win 8 for a half a year. It had no upgrade-to-full option, but for anyone who wanted to try it, they put it out there.
I'll admit that they don't give you a lot of [read: any] try-before-you-buy options for Win 8 currently, but this is the first version in a while that they've done like that, so it might get better again.