Doktor Avalanche
... All the start screen was anyway was an extra large start menu.
Actually I would beg to differ a little here.
The model for the Win 8 start screen was a touch pad with a fingerprint as the de facto scale factor. That made things much larger than a mouse pointer requires. But, moreover, the model was flat, not hierarchical. One had to scroll to see everything. With a mouse pointer and a hierarchical structure (folders, if you will), it was much easier to organize into compartments of functions that could all be seen in a small area.
The start screen has no folders and the compartments are small columnar areas with names at the top. That made scrolling over a large installation rather tedious, even if one placed all the most common stuff on the main screen area. So there is a tradeoff of extra mouse clicks into a hierarchy or extra hand swipes to move over a screen.
Naturally desktop mouse users would stay on the desktop where things were practically unchanged since Windows 7, so long as a start button replacement was provided.
In Windows 10, I still use the Classic Start Button enhancement as my 'Start' corner icon, but configure the Windows key to trigger the Win 10 Start menu. So I can use either rather easily.
My own feeling is that touch oriented things are best suited to small devices where portability is important and one doesn't want to carry a bunch of add-ons like a mouse or keypad.
If I had my way, this would all be voice activated like Star Trek computers so we could avoid all physical gestures.
One thing I find happening often on my laptop is that the touchpad sometimes triggers a mouse click event and things get activated/launched rather than selected/highlighted. The settings have to be tweaked and the fingers have to be trained. If I went to a different computer I might have to re-learn those instincts. I don't know if the touchscreen has similar issues. I do have a 10-point touchscreen, but I almost never use it. My hands stay in the keyboard/mouse area, not the screen area.
I suppose in the end it all boils down to one's habitual ways of working as seeming the best way to do things. And we all have a reluctance to change long-established habits.
Before the mouse came along, everything was keyboard-oriented and the new-fangled mouse seemed like an unnecessary add-on, but now I think of it as a keyboard extension.