Have you tried purchasing Windows 8 online? That's another experience altogether. I did that. It took 2 hours to make the purchase, with their horribly buggy store that doesn't even allow removing items from the shopping cart (had to clear cookies). It also requires Silverlight, which also crashes during the payment verification.
It cost me $199 and all I got was Windows_installer.exe, what a horrible joke. Well, let's try to get my hands on a Windows machine and proceed to generate installable boot image from the downloaded files. That went quite well, but I was furious at this point.
Ok, let's install and boot into my fresh Windows 8. That went fine. Next, let's try to activate it, and it says: 'This product key can only be used for Windows updates'.
Microsoft, are you kidding me? At that point I decided that I won't ever touch any Microsoft products even with a ten foot pole. I don't trust them, they are liars, and their products suck. Microsoft will not improve.
Then tell me how that is not lying to your customers? The information that this product is just an update from existing Windows installation is at the bottom of the page, no one reads that!
Same experience. Wanted to setup a VM with Windows, purchased Windows 8, and ended up with a .exe and no legal way of getting the actual image without already having Windows. It's ridiculous.
If downloading an app in WP is as good as downloading an App in Windows (last time I did this I felt like I was cleaning a septic tank with my bare hands) then there are no advantages at verticalization.
MS has cost me a lot in time and money, and this is something I try to avoid.
