what I found amusing in the report is the large DROP in Impulse use after the sale to Gamestop.... Interesting
Eh, it's not really that shocking. Most PC gamers have little reason to trust Gamestop. Everyone I know that used Impulse, myself included, have not used Impulse for anything more than re-downloading something since Gamestop took over. Not to mention Gamestop getting the rights to many more games is unimpressive; Stardock's Impulse sensibly didn't carry Steamworks games because it made no sense (why buy off Impulse if I need to install and run Steam to play it?). I can't imagine anyone is buying Steamworks (or other DRM schemes like with Battlefield 3 and ME3) titles off of Impulse now. Sure, Gamestop increased the number of titles in the store by a huge amount. But everyone's buying them directly from Steam/EA instead.
Whole thing is just win-win for Stardock. They get rid of a losing proposition (nobody will ever touch Steam/Steamworks unless Valve makes some colossal PR blunders), their conflict of interest with Steam and other providers is gone so they can sell on other services, any they can go back to making games and apps instead of running a service.
Funny though about the doom and gloom over Windows 8. Haven't seen it myself, but MS seems to unable to avoid the curse of making every other Windows OS crap. It's like they try something new, fail hard, then release a 'new' version 2-3 years later that just fixes all the issues with the earlier attempt.