Luddites is a very apt word choice
:P
Switching back to Task Manager could only be done it you knew where to change the shell in the Windows Registry. Microsoft never provided an official user configurable option to disable the Start Menu and Taskbar in Windows 95. You should see Classic Shell or Start8 (or the other various hacks floating around) in the same vein as modifying the Registry.
If you know it can search Control Panel, why did you say it can't?
That aside, I like the improvements to the search categorisation in Windows 8. On more than one occurrence when searching in Windows 7 I've ended up opening some random document or email instead of the app I wanted because of the looser categorisation of results that sometimes puts documents above programs for no obvious reason.
And new OSes (anything actually) shouldn't just speed things up with new releases, they should also make things easier to accomplish. This is a really difficult thing to balance correctly, efficiency vs. usability is often the bane of most software developers' working lives.
I totally agree about not being able to snap Metro /
TIFKAM next to each other, it's silly, but it doesn't make the whole damn thing useless!
And I totally disagree with you about Vista. It wasn't poor and it wasn't generally a flop either. Yes, it wasn't as good as Windows 7 and yes it was flawed in some aspects, but it was also featured some huge improvements over XP in both performance and security.
EDITED: 28 Oct 2012 15:24 by MATT