I've had a similar experience with mine. Literally struggles with copy and paste, but has taken to windows 8 (and modern UI/metro) extremely well, and has no problem with the various swipe gestures for working things. Many things- like printing- have been much easier. That said she does have a touchscreen, which I think is essential to get the benefits of modern UI-- although I still don't believe it is bad for a desktop user; just live in desktop mode all the time and only use the start screen from metro. Items are so much more discoverable in windows 8- that is, much less functionality is hidden behind context/sub-menus.