Like glynor said, there is no difference in how applications use WASAPI in Windows 8.1 compared to Windows 7.
Any changes/improvements are entirely under-the-hood.
Personally, I'm not aware of any real improvements on the audio side, however.
I did read that they cleaned up the WASAPI stack with Windows 8, but what that really means for real-life experiences, I couldn't tell you.
For me the reason to switch to Windows 8.1 even on my HTPC was video reasons entirely, since they vastly improved the Desktop Compositor (the DWM, Desktop Window Manager, also commonly referred to as "Aero"), and all of the issues I attributed to it simply went away after the update (and yes, it still exists, despite people believing it went away because we no longer have Aero-Glass effects)