After hearing a bit about the upcoming Windows 8...

[Duce]

You will be able to entirely disable the Metro interface (the Win7 phone tile interface) on Win 8 on a desktop computer.  They aren't going to cram a iOS icon/tile fest interface down the consumers neck.  It would be corporate suicide, seeing as MS's profits are primarily in the enterprise.

You won't notice anything different by upgrading to W8, however as a Win 7 user I see no reason to upgrade to Win 8.

Try the pre release version.

[Duce]

Touch interfaces will not be on desktops anytime soon.  Try using one to do day to day tasks like Office stuff - it's simply unusable, and the fancy touch UI in Win 8 won't revolutionize touch on desktops.  If it worked well, Apple would have turned OS X into iOS by now, but I'm sure that's only a matter of time.

Touch is fine for consumption devices like tablets and phones, but it's downright miserable for desktop users.  MS has tried it 20 times over for desktops and pen style/touch tablets and it's always been a trainwreck.