I wouldn't say 8.1 is better than 7 but it's not notably worse. It's trivial and takes 1 minute to get your computer to boot straight to the desktop and go straight to apps when you hit windows. While it's not great that it's fullscreen, you can still sort by most recently used apps. That's a minus to me. A big plus is shortcuts to commonly used stuff (for us IT people) when right clicking on the start button.
Personally, I think people's perception of 8 are based on two factors.
1. 8 was pretty bad (almost vista bad) when it first came out. 8.1 fixed most of the problems but "Windows 8" is already in the collective psyche as a meh release
2. People hate change. People got used to Windows XP changes from 2000 (or 98/98SE, which most people upgraded from). People got used to 7 changes from XP. Use a computer for a few months and all the changes are going to become second nature.
Funny thing happened to my perception of Windows 8 (8.1) after I started having to use it regularly (my job consists of integrating third party applications with flavors of Windows Embedded) I started disliking it less and less. 7 is still better but there's nothing wrong with 8.1 - For a Windows "Off-release", it's much more Windows 2000 than Windows ME or Windows Vista.
I'm personally looking forward to 10, seems like it's somewhat of a mix of 7 and 8. Built a new computer and needed an OS, decided to go with 8.1 since it was cheaper than 7 and since I can upgrade with either to 10.