There's sparks of brilliance in Metro, but it's too goddamn flat. It's not obvious what parts of the UI can be clicked and manipulated.
Apple is also hailed as genius for "inventing the tablet" even though Microsoft tried to make tablets happen for a decade before the iPad. It's just an example of execution having more impact than conceptualization.
The iPad has more in common with the Newton, which came years before the Tablet PC.
Tablet PCs, while great (I liked them anyway, especially with OneNote) might have been called a tablet, but it had little in common with the tablet concepts as presented in the iPad. Tablet PCs didn't even get capacitive touch until after iOS devices came out. They were wholly stylus-based until then -- no pinches or swipes.
That's not true, I own a HP Tx2 which was released before the iPad and it has a capacitive touch screen it works great and before it there was the dell XT2 too.
I just looked at the People app. I don't find anything confusing in it at all. Virtually everything in there is tapable. I didn't see a single thing in there that I thought someone would be confused about (at least with respect to the UI -- it's a bit confusing as to what content gets streamed in, but that has nothing to do with Metro).