[RandomOpinion]

>"The only advantage of having an Intel processor would be for the old-style traditional apps, and if you allow those, you have all sorts of problems."

That's precisely what MS is allowing. From Thurott's article:

"Even better, Windows 10 on ARM will supply a long-rumored feature: The ability to run 32-bit Win32/x86 desktop applications—Apple iTunes, Adobe Photoshop, Google Chrome, whatever—directly on the system, unchanged."

I suspect that MS probably would have very much preferred not to have to use emulation, which is always a tricky business, for Continuum on the Surface Phone. Curbing resource intensive apps is a vastly less complex engineering problem.

[scholia]

You appear to have overlooked the fact that OEMs can already make Intel-based smartphones and tablets, using Windows 10 for free. One smartphone example is the Asus ZenPhone, and there are plenty of tablets.

How many have you bought? How many has anyone bought?

> The ability to run 32-bit Win32/x86 desktop applications—Apple iTunes, Adobe Photoshop, Google Chrome, whatever—directly on the system, unchanged."

True, but they're in an emulator. Pretty sure they don't have access to the whole system, which they would on a standard Windows 10 device.

[scholia]

Extra info: there may be some confusion here because the above announcement is about tablets/2-in-1s/laptops NOT smartphones. The headline is (with my emphasis):

"ARM-Based Windows 10 Portable PCs!? Hell Yes!"

So if you recompile Win32 programs to run on this version of Windows 10 on ARM, they will be able to do all the (good and) bad things they can do on the x86 version....