Is this different from windows 10 IoT?

Having two Atom based tablets with attachable keyboards in the household (and yes, Windows phones) this is quite interesting. And probably first on Surface Phone.
But it's actually going into exactly the direction i thought about some years ago.

I hope, provided this works well with most applications, they can bring back the $200 Surface RT cause the value of that was excellent! Just that it didnt have any apps to run

And also that most of the Android tablets are yawn worthy

Right here. Windows lives on its complete backward compatibility for the last decades - there is no need for standard windows on mobile chipsets (ARM) without perfect software support (compare with WINE). Flies like a lead ballon, unless they manage a  perfect form of X86 emulation.

All tablets are yawn worth for most people, especially after Samsung normalized phablets. I have a tablet that I prefer to use in some usage scenarios, and it serves me so well, and recently I've been using it as a portable second screen for my laptop/PC.

If I'm not mistaken, Microsoft has a project where they'll basically emulate x86 code on ARM, kind of like a low level binary code translator.

It would solve app compatibility problems in the short run until programs have a native ARM version. I don't think Intel will be pleased to see this.

X86 should be patended by Intel/IBM and X64 by AMD - so Qualcomm had to buy licenses or we are going into the next phase of legal battles.

Qualcomm is not making  an X86 CPU, Microsoft is creating a layer that can translate X86 binaries to an ARM CPU, which is entirely legal and has been done for quite a while (like QEMU and Exagear).

IBM is only focused on POWER at the moment as well.

Hmm... not sure if u are not violating forum rules now ???

Huh?