MS's approach actually seems sensible to me and for the better good.
1) If you know enough about patches to delay them, and manually manage them you should probably be using Windows Pro anyways.
There are innumerable times where it's just inconvenient to install patches. Then there's issues like early Win8 patches were causing system instability. Then there's the out of date drivers that are wanting to be installed when you've already installed ones that are multiple versions newer - it just doesn't know that.
2) This will help discourage businesses from using Windows home in the business which is a good thing.
Except that the more the two differ the less work you'll be able to get your employees to do at home/more training you'll have to do hiring new employees/etc
3) Hopefully this will create better communication with MS and 3rd party software vendors so they can release updates which don't break things. (which is less likely to happen to home users anyways... in my experience it's the highly custom proprietary software inside of companies that usually breaks)
hahaha - you're kidding right?
4) this has an easy work around... use the Pro version instead of Home, which is what I normally recommend anyways. I used to charge 2x the hourly rate to work on home versions of XP, Vista.... not as bad with Win 7, etc... but still...
Fair enough, but if everyone is using the pro version instead of home, why have the home version that just annoys/insults/abuses users?