I see your point, if you are talking about the general population, but for the audience of HN, discovering how to change the configuration to return to a win7-like desktop is no challenge. Plus, I would be very surprised if companies started shipping Win8 with the Metro interface by default. All productivity environments will be set up on the regular desktop version. Frankly, implementing changes while allowing people to use the interface they prefer is not that bad. Ubuntu, for one, is clearly imposing you to use Unity and that's it. Don't like it ? Well, forget about using it then.

Re: Ribbons, I have never liked that very much, however it may be more positive than we think in the end, as it is going to provide visual consistency for users between applications.