I'm not bothered by the metro start as I use it for other things like the weather app and cookbook app as well as some others. Win8 is great for gaming, I love that. And new features like my laptop has volume buttons, so when I press up or down it shows up on the screen to let me know what level im at. Also does this with brightness. The hardware compatabilty is very good, its still in the development stage and not alot of hardware vendors are supporting it yet, but microsoft is putting drivers out there and working with vendors to push things along which is great. I have some bugs due to the beta drivers, like the sound and video. The sound will glitch every now and then, and the video driver does not have intel display software to adjust settings. I did a work around though, I loaded win7 video driver, adjusted my 3d settings, then went back to the win8 newer driver. Why ? because the newer driver works great on games, hard to believe a beta driver does better then the others lol. But every pc is different.
To me I'd say upgrade, If not for Metro then do it for better performance. I have a blast multi-tasking and music,gaming, watching movies. Its awsome, if your a skilled windows user then its pretty easy to work around the bugs with hardware. Its nothing major.