Sure, I will do that. That post was longer than I wanted and I had to run out.
I am mostly the same way about stuff being faster. I always turn off UI transitions and animations like Animate windows minimize and maximize, or fade and slide menus. They just make the OS feel like it's running through mud instead of air. I get what you mean about the Charms bar, and although there are keyboard methods to get to the power options they're still not as good as the old Win key-up arrow-right arrow-enter. I believe you can make desktop shortcuts or Metro tiles for quick shutdown, I was just never that bothered and now I have muscle memory for moving the mouse so it's not a big deal to me.
I wrote the wrong name - it's called Connected Standby. Basically the system goes into the equivalent of S3 Sleep but can still pull data from a network, say new emails or notifications. MS describes it as 'PC behaving like a smartphone when the screen is off.' Some brief searching leads me to believe Haswell isn't a requirement, there could be systems certified for it now, but it's not a standard power state it has to be specially included in the BIOS. I think though that it will be more standard for Haswell platforms. You can search and find out more than I know because I don't recall details well enough to not misinform, or here's an Intel whitepaper about it if anyone wants crazy details:
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/optimizing-windows-8-applications-for-connected-standby
As for Firefox, I was talking specifically about the streamlined 'minimal' UI of the browser, maybe that applies more to Chrome though.
Funny thing is I really don't use Win 8 much differently from Win 7/Vista or even XP. I hardly use the Metro interface, I just go straight to the desktop, 99.9% of my use for Metro is to search-launch a program which typically brings me back to the desktop. Part of the reason is because I'm super-old school and have desktop shortcuts
although it's by no means cluttered. I organize similar programs into folders and have a few system icons, I always felt that was faster than using the XP Start menu which didn't have search. It took me a while to pin programs to the taskbar but now I have my most commonly used programs there, ones I am almost certain to use daily. I never got into using search to launch programs or find files in Win 7/Vista but I should have...like I said, I do that now and I believe sometimes people need to be pushed to change to a better method - I wish I had used search-launch more in Win 7/Vista.
I think it's fine if people want to work the best way for them, but at the same time people should at least check the options to make an informed decision. What I think is silly is being militantly anti-Win 8, like 'no start menu, won't use it!' or 'metro is ugly, MS should just leave the desktop' (heh), when you can tell people have barely used it. Or they say 'I tried it for 20 minutes and it was bad!' lol