I don't quite get the hate. Firstly (and my god I'm going to get modded down - look at my comment history, I'm not a shill, I'm just dull) the ribbon is a better interface than a hierarchical menu system. It (at least in office 2010 - I never gave 2007 nearly enough of a play around with) behaves delightfully in the presence of different screen resolutions (seemingly) intelligently choosing which functionality to highlight on the ribbon within the space available and which functionality to push down into a menu. It also exposes more functionality at the 'one click' level than 2003 ever did, which makes discovering functionality vastly easier. The only thing the ribbon _REALLY_ needs is a 'search' option which is available as a power tool (plugin, or whatever it's called) which really should be vanilla. Sure it's different and requires you to learn new things, but it's not hard to learn, the benefits in learning make it worthwhile and surely learning is fun??
I express the same general sentiment towards Windows 8. The Metro start screen is just a glorified task bar that is much harder to accidentally click on. The number of times I've accidentally clicked on (and thusly lunched) a bloated java program (Aqua Data Studo, I'm looking at you) whilst actually trying to bring up an already open program (at the very least) frustrates me. Launching apps from the start screen (I suspect is better - there is a distinction between launching and multi-tasking) and switching to the desktop on login is just not that big a deal. You get to work - boot your computer up, log in (and then if using Windows 8 click the desktop icon/tile) load up Matlab, SPICE, Quicken or whatever then hell you use and then blow 8 hours tooling around with that program. Seriously - how big a deal is one extra click over 8 hours? Also, being able to press the windows key and see whether any of the applications/tiles you're running have received updates is kind of neat. I can imagine that will be very useful for checking email/facebook (more bad karama)/rss feeds.
New things are neat, aren't they? Computers are cool. Learning how to tool around in different operating systems be they Windows, OSX, Linux, BeOS, OS/2 or whatever is fun, isn't it? Where did we all lose our joie de vivre? Windows 8 will seriously not alter the fundamental way you interact with your PC, it brings (aside from the GUI) nice new technologies to the table - so why the rabid hate Slashdot?