[panicslowly]

The Metro UI is great, but the hardware on the market isn't exactly stellar (compared to iOS/Android offerings). If I were Microsoft, I'd be worried about something similar happening in the tablet market.

How are they going to stand out in non-traditional PC markets?

[georgemcbay]

Hopefully they are working with ASUS to build something like the Transformer, but running Windows 8 and with an x86 chip. Because that is absolutely 100% what I want.

I love my current Asus Transformer -- the convertible notebook/tablet form factor is the perfect system for doing the stuff tablets are good at while also being usable for doing actual writing and content-creation type tasks. The missing piece in the current Transformer is productivity software, like real IDEs. Windows 8 + x86 fixes that. I've been an Android fanboy for the past couple of years, but the promise of really melding mobile with desktop has me super jazzed for Windows 8 and I really hope Microsoft pulls it off.

[X-Istence]

Windows 8 has been ported to ARM, so it doesn't even need to be x86.

[illumin8]

Although I'd be willing to bet you need an x86 processor to run a full blown copy of Visual Studio 2012 or whatever release comes out with Windows 8.

It will be interesting to see how much of the first party software runs on ARM tablets. Will we get a full featured Office, or will it be PowerPoint/Word/Excel "lite" or viewers only? Will you need a stylus or will they actually redo the interface to be touch compatible?

There is an awful lot of software ecosystem that is completely incompatible with a touch UI. This is probably a bigger engineering task than the original change from 16-bit to 32-bit for Windows 95. I'm not so confident that Microsoft can pull it off in less than 18 months.

[georgemcbay]

illumin8 pretty much covered this already but the reason I'm hoping for a good x86 version of this type of system is so I can run existing dev tools on the system, like Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc. AFAIK there is no plan for the ARM version to be able to run x86 software (and such emulation would be painfully slow even if they tried it).

My current ASUS Transformer is great for tablet stuff (touch UI games, the stereotypical 'couch surfing', etc) and the the keyboard dock makes it great for things like lengthy email writing, web forum participation and the basic types of word processing I do (not very demanding in that area). Where it falls down is that I can't really use it as a serious self-hosted development box. A similar system based on x86 and Win8 could be my everything-box: tablet, notebook, development machine, etc.

[Lewisham]

As Nokia is essentially a Microsoft puppet at this point, I wouldn't be surprised to see Nokia enter the tablet market.

[barista]

You are right. When you buy a phone by the processor speed or the memory it has but if you look at the end product the phone is as impressive as any other out there. Particularly with the new mango update that is rumoured to release soon.