They really changed a lot with Windows 8 though. I’m a power user and it took me a while to figure it out. All sorts of other things like dragging a shortcut to the desktop was no longer there(and still isn’t in Windows 10). Windows 8.1 was a large improvement but still didn’t fix everything. Adding touch-first to their server UI was also a terrible decision.
On a tablet it wasn’t great either. IE was still bad for either the touch or desktop version and it was not a good experience to do touch stuff in the Desktop. There was never a really good touch browser.
I’m liking Windows 10 for the most part. I haven’t tried Edge on a tablet yet but it’s pretty snappy on my PC. It’s still a little buggy but it’s a good start.