I use Norton 360 and it works well with Windows 8 without any problems!

Windows Defender offers the same old options and UI and RAM usage is about half lower of what it used to be. Also, this program doesn't put an icon in the notification area.

Jim Hillier said
Good point. But most of the people I deal with are not going to know anything about services - how to get there, how to change the status. And I would suggest that will be true of a very large number of 'average' users. So it seems Defender may well become the new Internet Explorer - i.e. it's already there and not easy to get rid of.

Also, many AVs include a right click option to disable protection, I know Avast does for example. Not sure that necessarily relates to poor self-protection.

That has been the same right through the Windows versions.  Moving up to the next version has always had some challenges but we soon found what we were looking for and got used to it.

I'm sure Windows 8 will be the same, daunting at first but easy once you become familiar with it.  I had my initial doubts, but no longer have any problems that make me mad, I just go hunting.

The setting for Defender are not easy to get to or change as they are in the 'Task Scheduler' so making the ease of being disabled by malware very difficult.

I agree with Nightowl78!!!!!