Every IT guy who I have heard discuss the topic has said to stick with Win7. My conclusion: IT guys aren't feeling the 8... for good reasons I hope.
If a touch screen is out of the question I wouldn't bother with Win 8 just yet.
You know why?
There's several reasons:
1 - Hardware / software compatibility. Sure, they SAY your old stuff will work just fine with it. But what they say and what actually happens are often 2 different things. If you're supporting multiple systems in an office environment, you can't have "it MIGHT work" 'coz that'll definitely get you "You CAN'T work here, anymore. "
2 - Retraining - The Metro interface is completely unlike previous windows versions. If they've been using Win 9x/NT 4/ME/2000/XP/Vista/7, then they'll probably feel lost trying to relearn the system. That's assuming it works perfectly right out of the box for you, which isn't really a safe assumption until at least SP1.