I'll disagree with you there. With Windows 7, I never really had issues with crashing. However, on Windows 8, I have had several occurrences where the display driver repeatedly crashes and the screen flickers, which usually lasts for about a minute. I'd say that it's also a given that my PC will completely crash once or twice a week. I'm not sure what the cause is, but while I'll agree that Windows 8 isn't slow, it does seem to be more buggy and crash-prone, from my personal experiences (not to say that they speak to the product as a whole). I still like Windows 8 just fine, just saying that I have experienced something other than what you have.
As for the 8-RT thing, I honestly believe that RT never should have happened. It simply shouldn't exist. The options should have been 32-bit Atom Windows 8 (which gets comparable performance and battery life to the ARM-based RT tablets) and the 64-bit Windows 8. Both offer MOST of the application support of Windows 7, and one could have countered laptops/hybrids while the other countered the tablet market. The Atom processors are good enough to compete with ARM-based offerings from Apple and Android OEMs, in my opinion. There's just no fit for RT tablets, if Intel's next-generation Atom (Bay Trail?) closes the graphical gap in the slightest (as I've heard that 3D graphics are the Atom's weakness).
Unfortunately when it comes to drivers, and I'm not saying this to necessarily defend windows, but usually its because of the gpu manufacture. Especially on display drivers, since I've personally noticed that they seem to have more problems than anything in general, I mean windows 8 has been about the same for me, in terms of crashing and such as windows 7 was. If its your display driver malfunctioning, I can almost guarantee either you need an update, or the driver is just bad...
As for windows RT, and I've said this many times and I'll say it again, its a contingency plan for MS. ARM is still the largely dominant force in tablets and smartphones, Intel is the dominant force in desktops/laptops. The problem becomes that nobody really knows which way the market will go. look at apple, for example they have OSX and iOS, they don't know either. ARM is trying to make inroads into desktops/servers and intel is making inroads into tablets and smartphones as well. Sure you might not like RT but it is necessary for them because if MS doesn't have RT and arm does take over for whatever reason, they are set to go either which way.
Also, as you said earlier, and as someone that owns an atom tablet, their gpus are awful compared to ARM gpus. I mean most good games running on arm processors look about the level of xbox360 quality graphics. I tried running a 13 year old game on my atom tablet and it could barely run smoothly on the lowest setting at the lowest resolution (deus ex). So yes, in terms of battery life and processing, the intels are competetive with arm, but the better arm processors still have 3 major things over intel: battery life (while not by a huge margin, still about an hour or two at most), graphics (just spank intel on this one), and connectivity (all the qualcomms have LTE and so do the tegra 4's if I'm not mistaken, another thing intel does not have). Sure intel is just breaking into the tablet section and they've done a decent job so far, but they still have a long way to go to catch up to arm.