[bbarn]

I agree with this viewpoint, but it's not popular with this crowd for obvious reasons (hence your downvotes). I think there's a bit of a double edged sword here. People don't want to upgrade, but want a vendor to provide updates and protection for a long time with OS's. This is the SaaS/webapp model moving to the OS, because big version number upgrades have always sucked for all software - not just OS's.

Where else do people expect a single anonymous purchase of around a hundred dollars to last them for 5+ years with a vendor constantly making improvements to it?

It's a good upgrade, it's free, and people better get used to it. It's a good choice for most people, so unless you feel like compiling your own OS, it's gonna be stuff like this, chromeOS, or buying hardware/OS as a single package (apple).

Yes, plenty of us on here are hackers, or "special users" that might not think it's a good choice, but for the bulk of windows 7, and 8 users this is a good path and their experience will improve with it.