My wife has an HTC Windows 8 phone on Verizon, but she's had it for a few months, so maybe an earlier version than you're talking about HAL. It is a very nice phone, very fast. She likes it better than the Android based HTC Hero she used to use, but she does miss the nice UI of the blackberry. She had to turn in the first Winphone she got due to some defect, the replacement has bad sounding speaker, but it's not bad enough for another swap.
We got a Win8 HP desktop recently, it seems pretty nice too. I like the Win8 so far.