It seems pretty clear that you've never used Windows 8, particularly because you're referring people to the article rather than offering your own experience.
- it more than doubles the number of clicks and moves you have to do to perform normal operations,
When launching applications I actually need to use less clicks than before. I can also type the name of an app rather than hunting through menus.
With settings, I can launch the control panel via swiping on the right side of the screen, or right clicking at the bottom left. Again, less clicks.
Other than those two things (launching applications and accessing the control panel) everything can be done the same as in windows 7.
- applications (like the weather predictions) keep popping up when you least expect because you made a gesture with your mouse that the horrible horrible UI mistakes as another touch gesture that has nothing to do with what you want to do,
Never had that happen. You could always disable the weather app. I'm pretty sure you need to set this up to begin with before it even works, so if you never went into the app to start with, you wouldn't have this problem.
- you simply cannot find configuration features without knowing the specific keywords, because there are no shortcuts that do not involve typing these specific keywords/ This is something they started with the advanced file search in Windows 7, which is much worse than XPs, but went viral on Windows 8
I'm not sure what you mean. Yes, you can search for configuration options, which is something you could not do in previous versions of windows.
How would you find configuration features in Windows 7? What about XP? and how is that different from windows 8? AFAIK those "old" ways of finding things are still there, but now there is ALSO the ability to type what you want and have windows display settings that match your query.
I tell people that apart from the start menu, you could pretty much use windows 8 exactly like windows 7 and never know the difference.