It's perfectly reasonable. Yes, it may seem that Windows 8 isn't "that bad", but it does have a very real impact on the market. I've seen it with my own eyes. Of all of the people I know across all levels of technical sophistication very, very few of them are enthused about Windows 8 and many of them are actively turned off by it.
More so, while PC sales in general are also under assault from competing devices (like tablets and smartphones), that actually raises the importance of the desirability of the current version of Windows. It's when sales are weak and competition is strong that the effects of an undesirable OS are most pronounced.
Also, PCs certainly aren't going to "disappear" but the rate at which new PCs are purchased, especially in the near term, and the total size of the PC market is still up in the air, by a huge margin and perhaps even by an order of magnitude.
Casual PC users hate the lack of start button, but as a power-user I suits me just fine because I usually hide my task bar on the left side anyway. Having it hidden in the lower left-hand corner does not require me to make any dramatic changes. I also like the idea that the kernel has a lot of optimization making it faster on older hardware.
But as a human, what I hate legitimately and with a passion is having the "Mobile Web 3.0" paradigm being forced onto me with the Windows Market. Keeping games on a "real time" platform like Steam is one thing, but having my actual data in the cloud is not at all a comforting feeling. Not because I have anything to hide, but because I know that data is going to be mined for usage patterns and other valuable data that will ultimately be used to corral and control me. Features that cost money to support will be hidden behind deep menus and dialogs, affecting my productivity because their motivations are now skewed. Products they want to push are now right in my face and they know how much time I look at them, and by aggregate patterns, how to make it more "effective" i.e. annoying.
It's another bubble; There is a few applications that do benefit from this paradigm but unless it is managed very carefully, the temptation to extract my value for their own usage as a kind of user tax will always be there. The observer effect is not confined to quantum particles, it manifests up to observable macro phenomenon. While my incentive for taking a certain action may be fuzzy, it becomes binary when measured and leads to annoying false conclusions, a la clippy.
I don't really blame Microsoft and their solution is probably the best. I can't certainly think of anything better than hiding it on the right hand side, but it's still there, like a shadow hanging over the OS, waiting to slurp up less-wary users into its world, where I'll have to travel if I don't want to be left behind. If it is really as insidious as I imagine, they'll just die off as the machine leeches the life from them and we can all move along learning from the failed experiment. But chances are the machine will nurture its little human cells and use them to stomp out and consume anything that isn't it.
More so, while PC sales in general are also under assault from competing devices (like tablets and smartphones), that actually raises the importance of the desirability of the current version of Windows. It's when sales are weak and competition is strong that the effects of an undesirable OS are most pronounced.
Also, PCs certainly aren't going to "disappear" but the rate at which new PCs are purchased, especially in the near term, and the total size of the PC market is still up in the air, by a huge margin and perhaps even by an order of magnitude.