I bought W8 Pro 64bit OEM with disk in shop in West Australia yesterday for $149. Wanted a disk and couldn't wait for slightly cheaper version to be mailed out. And didn't want downloaded software.
Installed on backup machine with Intel i5 2400 CPU, 120GB SSD SATA3 HD and 8GB RAM. Overall good and very fast. Tried to live with tile start screen but gave up after a couple of hours, and installed
Ex7ForW8 hack to restore original Orb Start Menu. Metro is still accessible via toggle switch.
Did this because for a number of 3rd party apps, various sub-menus which show in program files and are normally found in start menu, were missing from: C: drive > Program Data > Microsoft > Windows >
Start Menu. These included Office 2010, Nero, etc. Also overall found installation of programs and creation of desktop shortcuts easier this way. Maybe it's just that I'm used to doing it that way, but Orb Start Menu works best for me.
In fact if the hack to restore Orb Start Menu hadn't been there I wouldn't have bought W8. In effect I'm running Explorer 7 on the W8 kernel and getting all the benefits of W8, but in practice identical to W7. So it's more or less like SP2 for W7 ... only you pay.
There are a number of minor glitches but hopefully these will be ironed out with updates. For example, running a DVD in optical drive would not allow "list" view of contents.
Drivers for W8 were available for Hewlett-Packhard printer & Inel mobo, but big disappointment is Acronis 2012 is incompatible and won't load on active OS. There is a work around to create and use Acronis rescue CD to create/restore backup image of hard drive, but continuous auto update of folders/files from OS to storage partitons is impossible.
Did a simulated forced system crash/restore using Acronis rescue CD. OS restored OK, but boot files failed. Ran W8 installation DVD and used "Auto repair" option and boot restored in literally 5 seconds.
Will continue to trial and hope hack for orb start menu is not borked by updates. Only other negatives is the folders, forward/backward arrows, etc, have very bland graphics. And when I ran CPUID it blue screened.
The biggest obstacle for acceptance for W8 will be with traditonal desktop tower users confronted with the major GUI changes. Persons using tablets/smartfones will adapt a lot quicker.