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.
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.
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.