I decided to give Win 8 a spin on my main HTPC this weekend. It had Win 7 32 bit installed previously. This was my biggest hurdle. I chose clean install in order to get the option of 64 bit, but the install process never provides this option. After hours of fighting this and researching I just installed the 64 bit flavor of Win 7 and I could do a clean install to Win 8 64 bit. Odd the Win 8 install process NEVER provides an option.
After getting past that, everything has gone pretty smooth.
This Remote seems to help me overcome some issues others here are having. I love the start screen (while I see many do not) and how you can simply use the remote to navigate to the tile you want to launch and hit OK. Much much easier than Win 7. And to exit any app I am in, I just click the "close" button at the bottom of the remote and I am back to the start screen. XBMC however dumps me to the desktop. Looking for a way around this, but again the remote I linked has a mouse like control on it so I can scroll down to the bottom left corner to get back to start easily. I haven't had as much time to use it as I would like, but I think I found that the close button may take me back to the start screen, will confirm that tonight. If that doesn't work, I will use the reg hack for the start button.
Boot time is faster, but Win 7 was fast too, so not that much of a difference. Love the copy files dialog and the ability to pause the process. Really great for copying multiple files onto a USB connected device. You can queue up all the files you want, pause all but one of them so you aren't crushing the limited USB 2 bandwidth.
One of the coolest things we did though was hook up
splashtop on my girlfriends iPad. I am not a fan of apple products, but the iPad with
splashtop is very cool. I am going to try it on my HP Touchpad running Android next. But this works very well and for the most part has resolved all control issues. It has keyboard and mouse, but it also turns your HTPC into a big tablet. Gestures and all the default tablet style control is there. You see your desktop/start screen on the tablet and on the TV just like a remote desktop session. She can be in the bedroom and work with Windows 8 and not see the HTPC monitor/TV at all.
The last thing I have as a snag is the Mysql install and my synching. I did something wrong there and my XBMC installs are not synched any longer. But overall I am really loving some Win 8. While I know many find the tiles and start screen ugly, I find it very usable and with the right interfaces (tablet using splashtop and remote) it's a great upgrade. There is certainly a learning curve, but as you learn how to do things you find it's much easier to navigate.
I won't be doing a Win 8 upgrade on my main PC anytime soon, but all my HTPCs will be running Win 8 in the near future.