As a UX person I still give MS a fail on Windows 8. Yes it has a clean, aesthetic look. But it lacks usability. And any design that is not primarily focused on usability is best described as Kitsch. Even if it has all square angles.
That does not mean I think Apples god-awful "tape deck" interface or the horrors that are games center or find my friends are any good.
I am sick of designey people calling everything good that has a straight line. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, design is how it works.
The Windows interface used to be clean and usable. Then they saw Mac OS X's Aqua and panicked, scrambled and came up with the turd that's XP, losing the "clean"; kept polishing that turd and came up with Aero in Vista, losing the "usable". It's a cautionary tale. With Metro Microsoft is at least getting the "clean" back, maybe the next iteration will bring back "usable". One can always hope.
Windows 8 is horrible. I am not going to fight you on that one as someone who's had plenty of trouble with it.
But it's not too much of a step back from Windows 7, so I find the more strict, general design philosophy to be a vast improvement; the gradients and Aero crap on Windows 7 and below was just so ugly to look at.
Windows's interface is horrible as always, and I don't envy people new to Windows who bought a Surface. Yikes.
That does not mean I think Apples god-awful "tape deck" interface or the horrors that are games center or find my friends are any good.
I am sick of designey people calling everything good that has a straight line. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, design is how it works.