What choice do they really have though? More and more consumers completely forgo owning a regular computer and only use a phone or a tablet now a days. And among the ones who do own a computer there's still a strong trend towards not paying for software, presumably a behavior taught to them by the overwhelming success of strictly ad-financed apps.
It's easy to forget that us here on HN are several standard deviations from the norm.
Windows 8 was supposed to dig into that mobile device/tablet market, as well as the Windows phone. You can argue about why Win8 was a titanic failure that pushed a backtrack in 8.1 (and Win10), but it seems like Microsoft didn't really know how to approach the space at the time and failed to commit to a trend they correctly identified early enough that they could have capitalized better on it.
It's easy to forget that us here on HN are several standard deviations from the norm.