What are MS doing, XP was to me the best OS, then vista was a disaster, win7 was ok, now this looks like "vista we will call you windows 8 with xbox dashboard".
Can't say I'm sold on it for a typical PC user. For a tablet system or a touchscreen monitor I would say yes its heading the right way. But the fact is the consumers are always behind by a long way till more and more people will end up with touchscreen PC builds. Just look how long x64 took to take off. Plenty of us had 64bit processors yet the OS let alone the drivers where not ready for a very long time, to me it all only really caught up with the consumer by the time windows 7 was out that everyone actually cared about 64bit on the development side.
Its a similar scenario to the PS2, yeah it could have a HDD installed and a network adapter, which allowed you to play games off the HDD, have a mini OS for HD film support with 720p support via component cables and let you play online with a processor with 128bit architecture, but again how long did that take to catch on...?