I think this is mainly for tablets and other touchscreen devices. Mouse and keyboard devices will still run the windows as you know it.

But for me, this is the way a tablet should work. Get every major hardware manufacturer on board and you are fine. This is so much better than iPad.

I am not into tablets, but this was pretty cool.

They'll be running this, with the ability to switch to the old style Windows when required by programs.

I wonder how they're integrating Kinect into this, if at all of course. And what does this mean for the NextBox?

Honestly, having a touch PC that I can use this on at home and a hybrid tablet for on the go, I would be one happy Windows user!

It looks like Microsoft is looking to turn peoples home PC's into a modified IPod.

No they will be running old style with the ability to switch to tablet/touch screen UI.  They have even said if you took a tablet and hooked a keyboard/mouse into it the UI can be set to automatically swith to standard UI.

My impression was that the touch UI would be the main UI, but I guess there isn't really one "main" UI then.

So you're saying Windows 8 won't have good apps you can use?

Windows 8 on ARM won't have backwards compatibility, so it will need many apps to be created, and the most logical thing to do would be to create apps that run in the touch environment, and run on both ARM and x86/x64 architechtures.

And that's before we know how the WP7 apps will come into play. If Microsoft plays their cards well, they have made W8 such that those apps can be easily ported over.

If it's lightweight compared to Win 7 and Vista, I could be so lucky to be able to skip, on my desktop, not only Vista, but Win 7 too. But if it happens to become another Vista, I'll have to choose between staying safe with Win 7 or waiting for Win 9. Booting Windows only for games, though, I'm still perfectly fine with XP, wonderful thing its 1 billion user base gave it such a mighty power on both HW and SW devs, maybe Win 2000 was even better, it was simpler and more robust and I had to abandon it only because some new HW didn't support it anymore, but with XP, for the first time, I've not been compelled for a long time to upgrade either for HW or SW compatibility issues, and most probably I won't be for at least another two years, if not even until the end of extended support in April 2014 (not using any other MS SW but Windows, whatever MS tries before XP appointed end of life won't touch me, only 3rd party SW could force me to upgrade before, but with XP huge user base they have no interest to drop XP compatibility earlier than its death unless they absolutely need 64-bit addressing).

Anyway, I'll most probably get Win 7 on my next laptop, so I'll gather personal experience and more infos to decide. And on laptops too I'll have skipped at least Vista, very good.

It's lighter than Windows 7 supposedly.

Don't know much about the whole Windows operating system except that when i have ever i had a computer it had Windows of some sort already installed on it. But other than that operating systems is still MS's major money maker so i expect them to try and launch a new operating system.