Essentials is just the freebie apps they used to throw in with Home Versions of Windows for free. It's nothing special. SkyDrive is a cloud storage implementation. OneNote can be useful, depending on your workflow. If you find yourself needing to make free-form notes a lot, it's great. If you can get away with having a good set of bookmarks and have some other way to deal with scraps of information, it's not that interesting.