SpeedStep, you are a flaming idiot. If you don't know the answer shut the hell up. Seriously. Obviously a person who is asking questions about re-installing an OS can easily find a licensed copy of windows 7. who do you think you are the microsoft police?
For everyone else. I ordered an xps8500 special edition also. i really hate the windows 8. if you are a 16 year old( like speedstep maybe?) and own a windows phone and just use facebook and twitter it's fine, but for serious work it is crap. not sure how they could make it so you can't disable metro, but i guess they just decided they needed to find a way to get rid of windows. as a long time IT pro, i'm pretty sure metro on server 2012 is going to be a disaster. and uefi bios is really a huge pain in the ass. especially on servers. it just solves a problem that didn't even exist.
anyway, i plan to check out your wiki. i had boot problems with my first 8500, and had to rma. after working with tech support for dell( which they also found a way to screw up) i finally reset the cache by changing the drives from raid to ahci and back in the bios. the ssd drive is actually just on the mohterboard like a previous poster said. i plan on trying to downgrade to windows 7 pro x64( yes, speedstep i have licenses, about 250 of them thank you very much) and if i can't get the xps8500 to roll with win7, i'll probably return even if it costs me a couple hundred.
so to sum up. thanks for the intelligent responses regardinng the wiki and the sata drivers and legacy boot mode,,, and to speedstep just shut up.