Personally, I'm glad this'll be the case, because let's face it: over the last several years, the Windows Kernel has done nothing but improve--faster, lighter, more feature-filled and highly optimized. Vista made Microsoft wake up and turn the bloat-ship around.
My main curiosity here is also whether they will go so far as to make the device compatible with apps from the Windows store. IMHO, that would be a stroke of brilliance, because it would immediately remove the "it's too hard for independent developers to get games on the system" argument by making the platform as open as it is for Windows. Of course, I'd also like them to release an XNA equivalent so devs can really target the hardware, and it'd be ideal if the store had an "optimized for Xbox hardware" section as well.
