Win 8 as a digital darkroom platform on a desktop?

I have not found any significant differences for photography applications.

Color management works as before. To get it working, you need to do 3 active steps, as before:

1. Selecting "Use windows display calibration" makes everything work very nicely across all user accounts, allowing for multiple monitors with different profiles, etc.. http://www.slagermanphoto.com/blog/2010/09/22/windows-color-management-solution/
2. Select the appropriate ICC profile for each monitor. I noticed that my monitor already had an icc profile associated to it. Maybe Windows 8 has improved lookup of drivers including monitor profiles. But not relevant to most of us since we will do our own calibration anyway.
   
3. Disable igfxpers if you are using any Intel graphics. This is now easier to do and can be done from the task manager. The setting also persisted when I updated the Intel graphics drivers via Windows Update. I.e. this step seems to be more reliable.