They reversed most of these moronic design decisions in 8.1 and the 10 preview, but they kept some (hopefully they will be fixed before they release). Like instead of having notifications (like "An update is available", "Restart is needed") appearing discretely at the bottom right of the screen they now take up the entire screen. Since Vista they should know better than their customers are trying to use their OS to do things, to work. Customers are not fascinated with the system and having the system interrupting them all the time is a terrible idea.
It doesn't take a PhD in UX to realise that.
That effort made learning xmonad a breeze because I accepted the idea that I would have to spend time paying the dumb tax. It turned out to be only a morning.
Emacs on the other hand....
I do not dispute that keyboard shortcuts are faster than any mouse based UI. And I am sure that you became more proficient having to go around the Win 8 hassles using the keyboard. However if the UI can only be practical if a user learns by heart all sorts of commands and shortcuts, then it is a massive failure, it defeats the very purpose of a UI, particularly a UI targeted at consumers.
Picking tools based on first impressions, is in my opinion, a suboptimal strategy. YMMV.
I've been using Win8 for about 1 hour/day for the last few months. The flips between Metro and Desktop still drive me crazy. You might have learned to accept that, or to avoid those flips, but this schizoid mode of operation comes with unneeded cognitive overload for desktop work, even if you did master it.
The thing is, Win8 was optimized for Microsoft's benefit, not yours. Win8.1 gave up some of those things, because (a) it didn't provide the benefit it was optimized for -- windows phone acceptance, and (b) it did alienate a significant portion of the userbase that clang hard to their Win7.
"Using 8 meant you had to learn something", yes. But for what purpose?
There used to be a book on Windows Annoyances that told how to deal with them. The most annoying thing about Windows 8/8.1 is the Windows Update and having to restart the OS in order to update and not knowing how long it is going to take and watching the "Updating 12 of 64" with the dots in a circle loop and not being able to do anything with your computer while that happens. If only Windows Update could run in the background and not need to restart the computer or if it does restart the computer it can estimate how much time is remaining of the updates.
Steve Jobs on the other hand already learned in 2002 that the desktop GUI won't work on a mobile device and set out to create a new GUI for mobile devices that led to the iPhone and iPad that was different from the Macintosh GUI. I think Steve Jobs saw the Windows XP based tablets that Microsoft made and their Windows CE smart phones that basically used the desktop GUI and how it just didn't work out.
Microsoft has almost always bet everything on the new Windows version. It doesn't always work out for the best. Some companies still use Windows XP because their business software breaks in Vista and above because of API changes. Microsoft no longer supports XP, but it is still in use around the world.