I have a desktop and a laptop on Windows 8 and really like how it runs on both of them. It is blazingly fast and not very difficult to use at all. In some ways I like it more than my MacBook Pro and my iMac. Seems to me that Apple too is falling behind the curve. I saw a very neat 12.2 Galaxy Pro tablet that runs on Android and I'm very tempted to replace one of my iPads with it.
So far I have found no programs that will not run on the Windows 8 OS. However, I am not coming from XP either.
Deane