The "correct answer" to this turn out to be not so deep. The wireless keyboard was not waking up fast enough on startup to get the key press to initiate any of the startup key combos.
Hitting a couple keys before hitting the power button on the mac mini allowed the keyboard to wake up first. All key combos work.
I believe the fact that the Bootcamp control panel does not show up on the Windows side, is because it is Windows 8 and Bootcamp and it's Windows support drivers are meant for Windows 7.
Also plugging the wireless keyboard into the mac also sped things up
This is because of how Retina is implemented on these new systems. In the Mac OS (and iOS for that matter), resources are doubled in size, therefore each point is roughly the 4 pixels.
To the system though, it still reports the 1440x900 size, even though the actual pixel count is 2880x1800. The Mac OS knows how to handle this looking for @2X resources or using native code to render things at a higher resolution offscreen before painting to the screen.
While on Windows though, it is outright seeing the 1440x900. Since Windows doesn't really have a built in way to handle the 'Retina' feature that the Mac does, things would be grainy. You would see the same problem on a Mac App that doesn't use native text or image rendering, that hasn't been updated yet.
So the only way to make it look crisp on your Windows install would be to run at 2880x1800 - which would be hard to see, or a higher resolution than 1440x900 that you felt comfortable with depending on stretching/artifacts/etc. That is until Windows does have some possible feature like this and implemented in a similar way.
When connected to your external display though, Windows is seeing the 1280x720 px, and rendering that correctly, but at whatever your native resolution is. Also, the pixel density on the larger display may be different.
It comes down to the easiest way to understand - the pixel doubling/retina features are an OS feature, not a hardware feature.
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I'm having a lot of problems running Metro Apps, some of them crash or fail to load.
Contacted microsoft via microsoft answers and they told me that the broadcom bluetooth may cause the problem. The driver is from 2009, I'm trying to get an updated driver from apple or other source.