Purely anecdotal, but I'm currently in the market to replace my now 4 year old laptop. My problem? The top of the line laptops do not have touch screens. If I want to have a touch screen I have to settle for compromises elsewhere. It seems, a high resolution touch screen is a hard thing to do. If I buy a laptop now I will actually have to accept a downgrade over my 4 year old laptop. Even if it's not a real issue, psychologically that is very hard to do. So I wait. I think a lot of other people are waiting too - first they waited for RT, then they waited for the Surface Pro, and now we're all waiting for better laptops.
I think this is only one factor that's problematic for Win8. Another is that it now as a touch-first OS, looks and feels like it is competing with the iPad. So perversely, MS may have opened themselves to even worse competition with tablets because they have conflated the desktop and tablet ecosystems together. Instead of people buying a laptop when they need laptop and a tablet when they need a tablet, MS seems to be saying "Hey, you think you need a laptop, but maybe you actually need a tablet?". This is so confusing. People don't know what Windows really is any more. So they either wait, or they buy the less confusing option, which turns out to be the tablet.
Not only that, it's hard to find a decent high-performance laptop that has a decent screen. If I were to upgrade now I might think of going with the Lenovo T430u, except it has a 720p 16:9 TN screen. How long until it's possible to buy an ultrabook with a 1080p or higher resolution IPS display? And hoping for a 16:10 aspect ratio is probably out of the question.
Those are getting there ... but the GPUs are all weak.
The closest I have seen to what I want is the ASUS u500vz which has a decent mobile GPU, but it's extremely hard to get hold of (at least in my country).
I think this is only one factor that's problematic for Win8. Another is that it now as a touch-first OS, looks and feels like it is competing with the iPad. So perversely, MS may have opened themselves to even worse competition with tablets because they have conflated the desktop and tablet ecosystems together. Instead of people buying a laptop when they need laptop and a tablet when they need a tablet, MS seems to be saying "Hey, you think you need a laptop, but maybe you actually need a tablet?". This is so confusing. People don't know what Windows really is any more. So they either wait, or they buy the less confusing option, which turns out to be the tablet.