In the interests of hopefully providing some useful info, I'll crack on
I've managed to do everything (I think) that I could do on my Win 7 system on Windows 8. It seems a bit like two different operating systems. The first one is the Windows Metro (or what ever it ends up being called) home screen. You can download "apps" to the home screen, much as you would on a tablet or smart phone. Some of these are very convenient and well put together. Ideal for when you switch the computer on and just want to check your emails or browse the web.
The next one is pretty much identical to Windows 7 desktop (albeit without the start button) In there you have all of your usual apps, some of which are desktop versions of the applications on the home screen. So yes, there is some duplication of content which could have been done better (IMHO). The one thing I really miss is live Mesh. As anyone who uses it will know, you can set it up to sync any folder on your computer to the cloud and any other Windows PC or Mac. This has now become Skydrive, and this is a retrograde step as only the skydrive folder will sync and you can't point it at your documents folder for example, its a folder in its own right.
I like that when I log in, my setting are sync'd with other computers that I log into (i.e. favourites, settings for Office, Filezilla and other apps that I use) I wasn't overly keen on using my live ID to logon with, but I've changed that to a picture logon now, so I feel a bit more secure. The picture login is where you pic a photo of your choice and then draw three shapes on it, so for example, if you picked a picture of 6 cars, you might underline one of them and draw round the wheels on another. When you logon, you're presented with this picture and you just have to draw the three shapes on the picture in the correct place and in the correct order and your sorted.
I've installed FS9 and FSX without issue. The only problem I have is that my Daughter had been into the DVD's for GenX last week and seems to have hid the DVD1 from the North of England set so I can't install it.
I'm not going to bother installing P3D yet until 1.4 is released on Monday, so I'll let you all know how that goes.