[pedalpete]

Is your phone a Windows Phone by any chance?

I've been using WP7 for a few months now, and it has a similar interface to the new Windows 8 UI. Though your concerns may be valid for power-users, the average user has and uses much less apps than you probably think. The most important thing is the browser, maybe an e-mail client and then a media player, and a few other apps. 10 buttons would likely be a lot for the average user.

At the same time, I somewhat agree that having a list is important. I suspect that hiding in Win8 somewhere is an alphabetical list of apps with search, just like in WP7.5