I had a similar experience but not quite as bad. I bought my used '04 in Dec of last year and didnt realize it had summer only tires as opposed to all seasons. I too had absolutely no traction just trying to back out of a restaurant parking lot one exceptionally cold night. Less than an inch of snow had accumulated on the road during dinner but the wheels just spun and spun. I ended up having to call someone to pick me and my girl up and had to leave my beloved new car there over night.

The next day I bought new 17" wheels with bridgestone blizzak ws60 tires and drove the car the rest of winter with fantastic results! I actually looked forward to snowfalls to see how the car would handle. If you're planning on driving through winter and snow, or even somewhere where it frequently gets below freezing, snow tires are essentially required. Driving with stock summer tires is suicide in the 8!

 

What many people fail to consider (and it appears some are to be found in this thread) is that there are times when winter tires are required (or at least highly advisable) even when there is NO snow... I'm referring to any time when the temperature falls below about 45F/7C degrees.

The rubber compound used in summer/performance tires simply gets too hard at low temperatures to function properly, even on a bare road surface. My Toyo T1-Rs have the consistency of hard plastic at or below those temperatures. Tire traction studies have shown an incredible drop in the performance of summer tires when used in cold conditions (I won't try to quote numbers from memory but it was huge - something like a 40% increase in stopping distance for example).

As for making driving "interesting" or "fun" or whatever other words you care to use, I don't appreciate people fishtailing and sliding around on public roads when I am sharing them. I save my hotdogging for ice racing and winter autocross (we call it "slush 'n' slide"), but on the street, my one and only consideration is getting to where I am going and arriving SAFELY. I don't appreciate others who deliberately endanger me by drivng in an unsafe manner or using inappropriate equipment for the conditions. That includes bald tires in the summer and anything other than winter tires in the winter.

I'm looking forward to driving my new R3 in the winter. I've never had the benefit of any traction control before. But if my Miata on top quality winter tires was a winter beater in all but blizzard conditions (when the snow was deep enough that the car was actually plowing snow until it started coming over the nose of the car), then I have no doubt that the RX-8 can be equally, if not more capable.

 

RX-8 is a fun car to drive on snow (with right tires). Blizzak is pretty good, but we have one of the best studded, Nokian Hakka 3. We drive it everyday in the winter. It is well balanced, easy to control, and has smooth power. DSC works well, too. In the first winter, we had a couple of troubles (and a few flooding) when starting at low temp (-30F or so). We put a fresh battery, and there is no problem even at -40F last year.