I've played around a smidge with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview in a VirtualBox VM and I think the improvements under the hood may be worth tolerating the Metro UI crap. I don't like that the entire screen changes to something I don't care about when I hit the Windows key and start typing but I can deal with it.

The one thing I cannot stand, though, is that it starts in the Metro interface by default. I have to hit the "Desktop" tile to get to a normal interface, and while I can hit "escape" to go back to the desktop and dismiss Metro, it doesn't work when you first log in. When you first log in, you have to hit that "Desktop" tile.

I know that the Enterprise versions of Windows 8 will go to the desktop by default. I don't know but I would assume that there's probably some registry key that would handle this. Has anyone figured that out yet?