Josh Smith has an article about this topic
on his blog. A pretty big deal as Josh Smith is decently heavyweight in the (Windows) developer world.
This bit is pretty telling:
Even firmly entrenched Microsoft developers, such as many of us in the XAML Disciples (formerly known as the WPF Disciples), have expressed a lack of interest in learning WinRT. See this Disciples thread which veered away from its original topic (an announcement of some WinRT feature) into a series of thought-provoking explanations of why people are not bothering to get into WinRT. The general consensus on that thread is that if you lack confidence in the prospects of Windows 8 and, by extension WinRT, why bother learning it? Why not spend your time and energy learning more successful and in-demand technologies, whose futures look bright and promising?
I am not saying that Windows 8 will fail spectacularly, nor am I saying it won’t. All that I can say with certainty is that the .NET developer community is decidedly not flocking to it, and that should be very concerning for Microsoft.
I know now that I'm back in the Microsoft camp, that the ignominious death of Silverlight has made me not be on the front lines in regards to WinRT. I see several similarities between the two platforms, and my confidence in it was dead on arrival.
How are other developers feeling about WinRT?
