[josiah]

The new touch interface looks interesting, but backwards compatability is baggage that threatens to make the Windows 8 user experience an ugly inconsistent mess.

Touch is great for mobile apps, but it doesn't beat the old mouse + keyboard when it comes to desktop productivity.

This discussion reminds me of arguments from the "Raymond Chen Camp" [1]. Backwards compatibility is of huge value and importance to Microsoft, but it's a big burden to carry as well. Throwing away all the code that has been developed to date for Windows would be a fatally stupid mistake.

Microsoft would be better served by keeping their touch based phone / mobile platform seperate from the desktop. I don't think it's possible to build a platform that nicely mixes UI metaphores.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html