My other laptop has been whimpering a slow death so I grabbed a Lenovo Y500 from Amazon.com (a friend recently brought it back from the US).

The new Metro tile UI is very beautiful, very modern and very useless unless you have a touchscreen or tablet.  I tried, in vain, to only use the Metro skinned theme without cheating or reverting to the classic pre-8 look.  However this was just too unproductive and unintuitive.  After a few days of trying to find useful apps (small selection in the marketplace), waiting for apps to load and figuring out how to close them (not intuitive), I finally stooped to the lowest of lows and got a start menu replacement (IObit StartMenu8).  One positive note is that the sleep/start process is incredibly snappy and the Task Manager is very informative (and detailed).

The machine itself is pretty good thus far, although I haven’t really pushed its insane specs (dual GPUs, 16 GB RAM, i7).  The trackpad is horrible, probably the worst one I have used.  In fact, I wrote my entire book on a Toshiba Satellite L510, without a mouse (just the trackpad).  In comparison, the trackpad on the Y500 is slow, unresponsive and inaccurate.