- Lightning fast. Startup and shutdown takes seconds at most. Everything else seems to be snappy.
- Better GFX performance and DirectX 11.1 (my Windows machine is a gaming rig)
- New Time Machine-esske backup system (at last!)
- Inbuilt antivirus (at last!)
- The Start Menu in Windows 7 was rather small and hard to use at my resolution. The New Start Screen has solved this.
- Was never a big fan or Aero (but I understand a lot of people are)
- Storage Spaces is fantastic for if one of my HDDs failed
- Plenty of tweaks to existsing desktop features that make them more powerful and useful
- Appears to use less resources than Windows 7
- Never had a problem with search in Start or Explorer. Maybe they'll fix your problem someday.
See this is the thing: none of those reasons are game changers, and in particular...
- 7 is already fast. My SSD equipped machine boots (from cold, including bios POST) in 10-11 seconds.
- tweaks to make desktop features more powerful? there are plenty of ways in which they have cripppled it also - search being a massive deal-breaker for me
- resources? 16GB of ram is 80 dollars. shaving a hundred meg (if that) = not something to convince me to deal with lost functionality
- the multi-UI paradigm is plain annoying. yes i can figure it out. if it provided some actual benefit i wouldn't care, but it doesn't - it is change for change's sake - they could easily have ADDED a more touch friendly launcher (like apple did with launchpad) if they wanted to - but no, screw you desktop users. screw you people who have existing workflows.
I have 8 here in test, have run it back to back on same hardware and the benefits for what business users do just aren't there. But there are plenty of drawbacks.
As far as gaming goes, Valve is trying to get away from Windows 8 due to the app-store model Microsoft is trying to force on people. With the resurgence of the Mac in recent years, more people will be writing for OpenGL for cross compatibility. And most DirectX games aren't even DirectX 10 yet, due to continuing XP support...
IMHO microsoft has made a big mistake. They took an unproven UI that had been met with a consumer reaction of "meh" on mobile devices, and bet the company on it, by pushing it everywhere.
The same UI will not work across phone, desktop and tablet. It will be crappy at all three, or at the very least, crappy on one or more platforms.
Apple made the right decision in not porting the iOS UI wholesale to OS X, and those bits that they did port were made OPTIONAL.