Microsoft sees that they need to get into the "app" market to increase their profits, so they make a platform that puts "apps" first.
Then, logically, their worst fear would be that apps become more portable so that the underlying OS becomes increasingly irrelevant. They don't see that as an eventuality if they continue along this course?
Microsoft traditionally has removed options from users in subsequent OS changes, Windows 8 is the next progression of it.
Yeah. I disagree with it strongly, but there is certainly a school of thought that prefers to remove options because it might confuse us "stupid users", rather than implement those options in a more robust and transparent way.
How can you encourage people to upgrade if the UI looks the same? It would be much harder to do that.
By not treating them like complete idiots and explaining that changes made "under the hood" are important too. Yes, I know that's unrealistic but that's how it could easily be done. Only, this entire industry has invested so much in the opposite form of marketing that at this point, it would be a shock to the average customer.
I personally supplement Windows XP and 7 with tweaks that make it easy to do multiple things (VirtuaWin for multiple desktops, Find and Run robot for quickly opening programs, Winsplit Revolution for moving application windows to predefined areas, WizMouse for scrolling windows not in focus). I wish I could easily do all of those in Linux, but so far, it seems it would require a good amount of work to get it to work.
Two of those are standard features of X (VirtuaWin, WizMouse). What Winsplit Revolution does is handled by some window managers. But generally the best way to do multiple things in *nix is with the command line, which is really simple and straightforward if you know how to use it. Most GUI applications take command-line arguments or have command-line versions that make this very easy. I am not trying to talk you out of your preference (leave that for the zealots), just pointing out that Windows doesn't have a monopoly on those things. That's a good thing no matter which OS you use.