[robotresearcher]

MS has been trying with pen/touch for ages. They had a "Windows for Pen Computing" way back in the 3.1 days. It's not that they have not been trying. The WIMP desktop and app model just doesn't work well with touch. Apple wisely forked the interface because no one has been able to do a single interface that's any good.

[MichaelGG]

MSR had a neat little thing that allowed some sort of "snap to UI element" functionality. That way, targeting a 16x16px thing like "close tab" wouldn't be so difficult.

Or they could have some sort of gesture that lets me go into a high accuracy mode. Or really, anything at all to make it easy to deal with. But nope, your finger becomes the new cursor and that's that.

[bztzt]

Win8 does implement fuzzy touch targeting (looking at the geometry of your entire finger contact region instead of a single point, and picking a best-match UI element) on the desktop. Office 2013 (desktop) also invested in a bunch of touch improvements. It hasn't been enough. (plus, they already tried this approach with touch on win7 and it didn't seem to be working - which, among other reasons, was why they changed tack for win8 in the first place.)