Seriously right now, every other time I've gone to my local best buy, I've ALWAYS come across someone that was impressed with touch and Windows 8. Either they've talked to me personally or I've overheard remarks about it. Today, playing with the Lenovo Yoga again, a guy talked to me and asked if it was a tablet or a laptop. And I flipped it over and said, "Both." He was fairly impressed by it. Toying around with a touch AIO PC the other day, a lady was making a purchase of a stereo system and was pretty taken back by the AIO form factor and thought it was "cool." She liked that she could Skype with it and have the touch input and use the traditional part of Windows.
Maybe it's something with the water here, but my many experiences showing people (not plopping it down in front of them and watch them try to figure it out without me showing them, as this is idiotic because they have no knowledge of how to use something new as I do) Windows 8 all with a mouse or touchpad, it's been overwhelmingly positive. I recently asked my small group of Windows 8 users (about ten people that have been using Windows 8 for more than three months, a few for a year) about their opinions about Windows 8.
All of them liked it. All of them, given the choice between 7 or 8, Windows 8 is the choice to have. I also asked several of them and a few others about using a touch enabled PC. Pretty much all except for a couple liked the idea. Touch on the desktop was iffy, touch on a ultrabook or a tablet was unanimously liked. Some are using the apps and like them, some don't. A couple barely use the Start Screen. A couple others LOVE the lock screen, and those two were using Windows 8 on a desktop.
I call BS on the dissent. You don't give someone a Mercedes Benz and expect them to know how to drive it properly after driving an old Ford Fiesta. By just not showing someone just the simple basics of how to use Windows 8, or at least telling them, you've basically just misrepresented the whole OS and UI. Yeah, it can be tricky and yeah it's different. Why wouldn't you not show someone the ways of how to use it? This I've yet to understand. The argument that says that is shows that Windows 8 is unintuitive is a load of malarkey.