For me, best Windows is a tie between Win XP (works on minimal hardware, fairly quick and bulletproof, but config issues) and Win 7 (just works (in the MacOS sense), as long as you have the hardware). I don't think that Win 8 is either better or worse, just strange and hard to see any advantage. As far as the cloud tie-in, again there is little utility at present of having it in the OS -- and third parties (Google & Amazon) already do it better.
