As a different developer who's been using Windows 8 for about 2 weeks as well and I really like it. I will agree that some thing not being particularly intuitive and you really have to memorize a few keyboard shortcuts to get going. Once that's done it's great. The UI is almost exactly like Windows 7, with a bunch of small improvements, and while I have no benchmarks, my initial reaction is that it feels more responsive than Win 7. I have yet to really find a use the Metro part of the UI, but I simply pretend it's not there.

What in particular did you find was slowing you down?