At long last, the little status bar filled and I was surprised at the very different-from-expected interface that greeted me. At first I was puzzled, and hoped that learning to navigate wasn’t going to be a counter-intuitive experience. (I like to watch a little TV with my meals, and dinner was already getting cold — yes, I know. First World problems.) As it turned out, everything was just as easy to find as it was with the last design; in fact, I think the new interface utilizes space with better efficiency so that features are more easily accessible than they were before. (In my experience so far, it seems that there’s much less aimless scrolling necessary).
Metro has slowly chipped away, with the sacrificial foot soldiers of Windows Media Centres and Zune HD's paving the way for Metro to step up with Windows Phone, Xbox, and in the future Windows 8. The holistic, long term approach to UI is starting to pay off.