What Windows 8 does do, though, is trick you into thinking it's running faster, or "smoother". It uses animations to make those 0.5-1-second delays a lot more bearable. But the underlying performance is virtually the same.
Second, what the hell is a "trick?" It achieves basically the same result, but faster. That's called performance optimization.
I once doubled a hot area of compiler performance by doing aggressive inlining and removing some tuple allocation for closure conversion. It couldn't be performed in every possible situation, obviously, but the 99% case had a 100% performance improvement. But I shouldn't have bothered because that was all a "trick", right?
A brief look at your comment history says you only comment on political stories, so I don't know if you're a developer or one who has worked in performance optimization, but let me give you a little advice -- it's all tricks. It's all shuffling around your I/O patterns to avoid cache misses and reducing allocation to lower memory pressure and all that other crap. If you increase performance by caching the kernel on disk, which has the same impact for 99% of people as doing a cold boot, that's a performance optimization, not a "trick."