Meh. Why bother. You are being too difficult. You are artificially limiting your choice and possibly forcing yourself to make a sub-optimal purchase.
After all the horror stories I'd heard about Win8, I went shopping specifically to buy a laptop with whatever OS (preferably win7) so that I could either wipe it or make it dualboot and install Ubuntu/some flavour of linux. I figured I'd have a good play with win8 in the shops and see what the fuss was all about.
Ended up buying a Samsung laptop with Win8 on it at the start of January. (8Gb Ram and it was cheap ;) First time since DOS that I've had to watch a tutorial to figure out how to do basic stuff in an OS, other than that it's ok-ish. Win8 was $%^%$^$% frustrating in the first week, but now it only gets in the way occasionally. (Having said that, I haven't used it for development yet)
I was going to make it dualboot with Ubuntu, but slashdot tells me that this might brick the laptop, so I'm using VirtualBox to run Ubuntu 12.10 and next week I'll create another VM for the latest version of Fedora (honesly, how bad can it be ;)
I can see a point coming up where Win8 will start to annoy me, and then I'll wipe the whole thing and install some flavour of linux permanently.
It doesn't matter what version of Windows is on your laptop, you're not stuck with it and you can still install whatever OS you like.
Unless you buy a Samsung laptop like I did - but I believe there is a fix available, I'll wait for the next version of Ubuntu before I risk it :)
TLDR; Win8 is ok, it's not that different from Win7. Just buy a Win8 laptop with the specs that you like and get over it.