Excited and can't wait to get my hands on 8.1 RTM.

The touchscreen is a "nice to have" feature and not a show-stopper at all.

I imagine that a lot of people will continue to use older hardware that was designed around Win7 or even XP, to run Win8.x. Win8 is actually more streamlined than Win7 or XP. To their credit, MS is not lying when they said that Win8 can potentially run faster even on hardware designed for Win7.

Microsoft is really improving on their coding... they seem to be doing less recycling and more rebuilding the code essentially from scratch.