For me, the start menu was nothing more than a glorified app launcher and search bar. I never used it much for anything besides that. So from my perspective, switching to the new start screen wasn't that big of a change. I'm still using Windows about the same way I did before.
If you're one of those people who liked keeping all your stuff under All Programs menu, I could see why you wouldn't like it. For everyone else, there's really no reason not to like the new start screen...unless you can't stand that transition effect for some reason.
There is a learning curve, yeah, and MS could've done a much better job of showing people the new way of doing things. But once you get used to it, you're flying along without any problems. For example, all the low level Windows items used to be buried underneath the control panel sprawl. Now? Just drop your cursor down to the bottom left corner of the screen and rightclick. You now have immediate access to everything from add/remove programs, to the event viewer, to the device manager, to the command prompt. Win8 has tons of neat features like that.
...but MS doesn't tell you they're there, so they're not doing anyone any good. I didn't even know about that until after I installed the actual final version of the OS a couple days ago. It's a helluva lot easier hitting it all from there than it is searching for the control panel over and over again from the start screen.
It's weird. The OS is actually fairly well thought out, it's just none of it is immediately apparent, and it works differently than what you're used to.
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