It also used little resources and it was the last time Microsoft pulled a massive dev effort to modernize almost everything in Windows, significantly evolving it's display and rendering pipeline and making a whole different design language
8 touch interface was also by far the best touch interface I've used
It was an improvement but still not great. Ideally they would have kept the Windows 7 interface with maybe some upgrades like virtual desktops, then continued with all the under the hood improvements.