Interesting that Stardock did this Bill. I guess they are anticipating the flood of complains from people who will feel lost without the Start button. But, it really isn't necessary. MS didn't remove it to piss people off. There's good reason for it not to be required.
You see the reason there is no Start button on the taskbar in desktop mode is because the Metro screen IS the Start menu.

The first Metro screen has all your install program shorcuts and an the quick pick tiles for common tasks.
All of these can be moved around or removed as you like.

To get to your programs list as you used to see in your Windws Vista and 7 Start menu, just left click the Metro desktop and click the 'Apps' icon on the bar that slides up from the bottom.

You can add a tile for any program that isn't on the Metro Start screen by right clicking the program's .exe in Windows explorer and choose 'Pin to start'..

To get to other stuff move the mouse cursor to the top-right edge and the 'charms' will fly out.
Pressing the 'Settings' charm will give you other computer settings (including the shutown button which gives you the familiar shutdown options).

When you are in normal Windows desktop mode, tap the Start key on your keyboard to jump back to the Metro Start screen.
The Start key also acts as a jump-back key. For example if you are viewing your installed apps and programs screen in Metro, hitting the Start key will jump back to the Metro Start screen, hit it again will take you to the normal Windows desktop then back to Metro if you tap it again.

I'm growing quite accustomed to the Metro UI and all the other changes, they seem quite intuitive, especally to smart phones users, which is the point.
Also, I have installed many of my regular programs on Windows 8 including Xara Web Designer and Designer pro without any problems.

W8 CP boots very fast even on the older hardware (with a slow 5400 IDE 80GB hdd).

I think anyone curious about it should at least try it for a while to get used to it, the consumer preview expires in January 2013, by which time it will have been released a few months.
Microsoft are betting their entire Operating System business on Windows 8, I don't think they are doing so on a whim. They have done their market research and must be pretty confident that this is the future.
So far, it's a pretty slick OS.

So give it a go I say