I just got a new touchscreen laptop with 8.1 and I don't even use the touchscreen functionality. I don't understand why people complain that 8.1 is more suited for touchscreen.
8.1 seems ok to me. Some things (mostly the control panel) are not where you expect them so take a little while longer to find and you have to remember that more app tiles are downwards but it's perfectly usable and reasonably snappy in many ways. And you can go to desktop view and do 99% of the usual stuff you did before from there.