I think more people would be fine with Windows 8 if people stopped telling them that they should hate it.
Same for Vista; personally, I never encountered problems with drivers/sluggishness that people told me were bound to happen. It wasn't a spectacular upgrade from XP but I think most people avoided it because people were very outspoken about how supposedly awful it was.
With Vista nobody told my wife she should hate it but the version that came pre-installed on her laptop never worked right and so she told me to return the laptop or put something on it that worked, so I installed Linux.
The problem with Windows 8 seems to be a general issue going on with UI design generally. If you look at Unity and GNOME-3 for example, these also break settled user expectations. It's like there is a rush to tell the users they are stupid and don't know what a usable UI is. I don't get that.
Oh, if only the problems were just drivers and sluggishness (both of which my wife saw). Nevertheless, she stuck with it for almost 9 months until Vista, while trying to repair a routine unclean shutdown, managed to render itself completely unbootable. Given that we had to start over anyway, I ended up buying an OEM copy of XP Home for her. She was shocked at how well her laptop actually worked (since we'd bought it with Vista in the first place).
Same for Vista; personally, I never encountered problems with drivers/sluggishness that people told me were bound to happen. It wasn't a spectacular upgrade from XP but I think most people avoided it because people were very outspoken about how supposedly awful it was.