So here is "Cortana", Microsoft's ripoff of answer to Apple's Siri and Google Now, and other personal assistants I'm probably forgetting.
It's obviously not very helpful if you have no microphone, which I don't. But in my experience, it hasn't been all too useful. And you can't change the search engine it uses from Bing to something that is infinitely more useful.
Really, I don't think Cortana is worth all the hype it got (and is still getting). Perhaps it will improve, but I liked the older Windows Search better. Fortunately, it's still there.

Now this is nice. Microsoft finally caught up with Apple and the Linux/UNIX world and implemented multiple desktops with this "Task View". The name sounds like a ripoff of "Mission Control" in Mac OS X.
This should have been in Windows years ago, but it is nice to see Microsoft catching up at least a little bit.

This is the new "Action Center". Very tablet-esque, has no place in a desktop operating system, and shouldn't be here, yet it is. Of course, I'm not surprised. Notice the presence of the "tiles" at the bottom for controlling various aspects of the UI. A lot do make a little sense on a regular desktop, but most don't.

"Balloon" notifications have been replaced by this, and so too have some of the dialog boxes. But not all of them, curiously enough.

The Explorer has remained mostly unchanged from prior versions of Windows, except it now has a "quick access" thing in the sidebar that is supposed to display most recent items. Like the start menu, it has no clue what I've used most recently (or ever) though, so that's broken.

Yet another new kind of dialog box! So much for simplifying everything.