Ballmer used to say the same thing about Windows 8. Apple says it about every iPhone, Samsung says it about every Galaxy S. It's become the go-to sentence for marketing in tech and to met it's ridiculous...
I agree they did mess up the UI, and did a bad job marketing it, but from a technical standpoint, W8 was the best version of Windows so far (when released), consistently.
They broke that rule with Windows 8/8.1 and are trying to fix it with Windows 10.