[MatthewPhillips]

Sort of, I guess the biggest difference is in how you add them. Adding widgets is an intentional thing; you decide you want a weather widget on your screen. A tile is something you discover and decide to keep for later. So you find a restaurant you like, you pin it. You don't say "I want to pin something, let me look through a list of pinnable things and pick one".

[freehunter]

That's one use for Tiles, but not the one I'm referring to. Pinning a map is great, but pinning a weather app makes it continuously update the local weather and forecast right on the app shortcut. Pinning a stock app makes your stock quotes show up right there on the app shortcut. There's many use cases for pinning a Live Tile, and the best part is they're all done using the same mechanism.

[fyi80]

To do something like this on Android, you'd need an API for an app to install a widget. I don't know if that's possible outside of the standard appstore download/install process.