Most people only have access to Windows 8 on a desktop or laptop, without a touch screen. The interface lends itself better to touch screens, where I think it could do well.
I thought it was interesting how the rest of the world does it.
When phone/desktop makers wanted to make a tablet they all went from phone up to tablet. Microsoft ditched the phone OS and shrunk the desktop to the tablet, thereby turning the phone Windows Phone 7 into an irrelevant niche product sort of like Palm's WebOS. (Heck, even HP took WebOS up to the tablet)
As a developer, I see the tablet as more of a grown up phone not as a shrunken desktop or crippled notebook. The desktop will always be the desktop. I see absolutely no advantage of staring at a 24" screen with oily fingerprints all over it and having sore shoulders from constantly hovering my hands inches off the table surface touching and swiping things on the screen.
On the other hand, the tablet boots Right Now and thus serves a totally different purpose. I don't know of anyone who has taken their desktop or laptop to bed and tried to read for a couple hours holding the display up while supine.
Voice control just isn't go to be compatible with the typical open office environments. OTOH, I can see that in Obama's new economy where the government views the remaining few Producers as overweight, they just might mandate mixing Microsoft's Kinect technology with massive video screens so we can get an aerobic workout doing a full day of Tom Cruise's character in Minority Report shuffling spreadsheets and composing presentations.
I'm currently putting together a project that puts a typical desktop app on the tablet, but simple things like sorting and indexing large compressed files harkens back to the days of the 640K PCs with extremely limited memory heap. What tablets out there have several gigs of high speed RAM?
I understand that win8 will also allow for kinect on regular computers.
Windows Phone 7 will become obsolete when Windows (Phone) 8 drops, but that was pretty much in the cards from the day it launched. What Microsoft is doing is unifying their phone/tablet/desktop OS, not too dissimilar to Apple's OS X/iOS approach; the same codebase and shared interface elements. I see Windows 8 moving to tablets as converging from both above (desktops) and below (phones).
MS is going a step further than Apple in making the Metro interface available on the desktop, where Apple is adopting iOS interface elements piecemeal; we'll see if it makes sense and if anyone uses it that way. MS is also walking back its earlier plan to run desktop apps on tablets, probably because someone tried to actually use Photoshop on a touch screen.
As others have pointed out, Microsoft offered a tablet OS a decade ago. More people bought iPads in the first year (possibly in the first quarter) than Windows tablets in ten years. Apple's innovation, one of those ideas that seems obvious in retrospect, is that multitouch and something like a phone interface is the way to use a tablet, not poking with a stylus at an interface that was built for a mouse.
Voice control just isn't go to be compatible with the typical open office environments.
I think it'll be in the mix. It won't replace the mouse or keyboard shortcuts, but I can see it being useful for short queries; in the middle of typing, "Siri, how do you spell 'discombobulate?'" or "Siri, what's the population of Iceland?" is quicker than shifting over to a Web browser and searching google.
I'm currently putting together a project that puts a typical desktop app on the tablet, but simple things like sorting and indexing large compressed files harkens back to the days of the 640K PCs with extremely limited memory heap.
I think that's A Good Thing. As desktop and laptop specs exploded, programmers got lazy, knowing they could just throw more hardware at it. Each generation of developers needs to be challenged every now and then to write tight code under resource constraints. Look at the original 1984 Macintosh -- it had a complete OS with a GUI and a couple of apps on a 400K floppy. Programming that took care and skill.