I rather think that you're seeking out a particular narrative and, quelle surprise, you find it.
Not sure something titled "Mum tries out Windows 8" can really be considered a tutorial for one. There's always a bit of a learning curve with something new. That's what I like. The mind is a muscle and if you don't use it, it atrophies. It's called neuro-plasticity and the basic concept is that the more you reinforce things, the stronger the neural connections in your brain become. Making you less likely to slip into a geriatric fog later on in life. You can't stop your mind from degrading with age, but you can most definitely ****** the process considerably.
In any event, if it takes you more than 10-15 minutes to figure out Windows 8 coming from pretty much any other version of Windows from Win95-7, to paraphrase the late Steve Jobs, "You're doing it wrong." There's the old saying "Jack of all trades, master of none." The people who make that comment do so to try and be derisory, but also don't realize it's not about absolute mastery of something. It's about learning enough that you can figure the rest out with the application of some logical thinking. I can seamlessly transition between using Android, iOS, Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Not just that, I can adjust to dealing with different versions of each almost immediately. Some of it might just be a natural affinity with technology, but most of it is because I spent my time focusing on common elements to each one of these systems. I spent my time cultivating a lot of generic knowledge that I can apply to a wide variety of situations. I may have never seen this error or program before, but based on experiences with other errors or similar programs, can make a few assumptions that gives me a place to start. People who specialize heavily or exclusively in a narrow range of subjects often find themselves left behind when the world moves on.
Windows 8.1 is, for all intents and purposes, Windows 8 SP1. It came roughly a year after Windows 8 launched, so basically right on the same schedule as XP SP1, Vista SP1, Windows 7 SP1 and probably on down the line to the very first OS to get a SP release. Again, it's what appears to be a case of people conveniently forgetting even recent history because it would poke an aircraft carrier sized hole in their narrative.
Microsoft has been trying to get away from the whole service pack idea mostly for PR reasons. There's a certain negative connotation that goes along with the concept of a service pack, indicating that there were a number of significant flaws needing to be fixed. Of course the other way to look at it is that the company actually took the time and put in the effort to fix these issues. Plenty of companies will dump some product on the market and that's it or if you deal with enterprise level software like Oracle, SAP, or some of the major Unix vendors, you find out that any and all patches to the OS, security related or otherwise, are part of a separate service contract. So you just plunked down $50K for the software and maybe another $100K for the hardware to run it, now they're going to hit you for another $10K/year if you want patches. Those numbers are merely illustrative BTW.
If you think Microsoft is bad, you should look at how companies like HP and Oracle treat their enterprise customers. You think the airlines have the market cornered on treating people poorly, you haven't seen anything yet. Oracle is routinely sued for what amounts to out and out fraud when bidding on large contracts. If you look at the lawsuit the State of Oregon recently filed, that's just one in a long string of such lawsuits all with nearly identical stories. That is why Microsoft really took over the market. They had a vastly inferior product, it was untested, unproven, but Microsoft had a couple of important things going for them. It wasn't just that the initial sticker price was lower compared to the competition, it's that Microsoft included security updates for several years as part of the cost of the software. You buy any version of Windows and Microsoft commits itself to supporting it for roughly 10 years, gratis. Other products have differing lifecycles, but they're all very clearly published on Microsoft's website usually even before the software is available for purchase. Compare that against having to pay for the software and then pay an additional fee every year on top of that to get updates for it. No one else does this. Apple just supports things until it decides not to, and never bothers informing anyone when it stops. Even LTS Linux distributions are only for 5 years and then they only have one LTS release at a time. Every version of Windows is supported for roughly 10 years, sometimes longer. You might be able to pay Oracle or HP to support some more than 10-year old software, but you can bet they're going to keep jacking the price up over time.
Maybe it's because I've done some small amount of development work that I'm willing to cut Microsoft a bit more slack than most. I not only have some concept of how much work it is to build even the smallest of programs, I know just how unreasonable and ungrateful users can be. For every open source success story like Linux or KDE, there are probably 20 others where the developer just got tired of people sending them nasty emails demanding this or that new feature or bug be fixed and decided to just pack it in. Or maybe it's because I have enough knowledge and experience about some of the alternatives that I appreciate just how good we have it (relatively speaking) with Microsoft. Even at their height of Machiavellianist ways, they still didn't hold a candle to the likes of HP, Cisco and Oracle.
There was actually an interesting little bit I heard on the radio today about some new initiative in England to start teaching a lot of computer science type topics at all grade levels. If you listen to the story, towards the end you hear the person start describing how they teach young kids to break down a task to a point where you can program a computer to do it. It gives a pretty good sense of what it is to program. So many things that you absolutely take for granted or do without any level of conscious thought need to be explicitly programmed for a computer to do.
http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-09-25/reading-math-and-javascript-coding-now-mandatory-english-schools
That is what developers have to deal with and when you start to consider that, you can see how it is easy becomes to overlook something (i.e. a bug).
And I'm guessing you are just taking a bit of license, but Bill Gates hasn't really been directly involved with day to day operations at Microsoft for well over a decade. He's chairman of the board, so might help direct broad strategies for the company, but wouldn't necessarily be involved in day to day operations.