Talking specifically about live tiles: I love that I am able to hit the Super/Windows key and immediately see an overview of all of the information I care about. This includes notes, emails, weather, calender and stocks. I don't see how it failed at all-- it's wonderful.
I think this "Windows 8 sucks" meme should die in a fire, because it's grossly inaccurate at best. And this is coming from someone who primarily uses an OS X-inspired GNU/Linux distro (Elementary OS) as a daily operating system.
MS's version just ropes you into the MS App Store ecosystem. Found anything you want to download there recently?
I may be a linux user, but that's only because windows sucks so bad. Lots of people will tell me that it's really my fault that windows is behaving badly on my machine. But when I explain to them that I don't have the same problems using linux on the very same machine as windows, they can understand my point.
(yes I know MS is looking at container support for Windows, but the fact that there has been no information or technical details is troubling)
Then just use docker to run your code on EITHER windows or linux.
On the strength of today Nadella hasn't reined in the Windows group anything like enough. Clearly too much of the same management as presided over Windows 8 remains. They would have been better off producing Windows 7.5 than this. A good start would be to accept that the Live Tiles might have been a nice design project, but have completely failed in the wild. The same goes for the ludicrous swipe on sidebars.
So I'm calling it now: Windows 10 is another turkey. Not as bad as 8, but Windows 7 has got a new lease of life.
This is a shame because the world could do with Windows 10 actually being good, and Azure and the Microsoft services are close to best in class (Office 365 has stopped Google in it's tracks) but today they demonstrated they still have that inability to score from an open goal.