Is it just me, or does Windows 7 feel a bit long in the tooth compared to Android?

@thomg57 - regarding current tablets, you're absolutely right - iPad and Android have Windows completely beat. For now.

I am willing to bet that in 12-18 months time, when Win8 is released, that it will sport a new UI for tablet scenarios that takes the best elements of Windows Phone's Metro UI along with a bunch of new and improved features including voice recognition (which is already well served via Windows and improved upon by Windows Phone 7), touch and gestures (from WinPhone and Surface) and a host of other improvements born from IE, Silverlight, XNA, etc.

Since we've already seen early builds of Win8 running on credit-card sized ARM boards, I also expect that Win8 will be available on a wide variety of slim, sleek, fast but power-frugal ARM-based tablets and phones.

Microsoft is already hard at work making sure Office (and many of its other products) support ARM and Windows8 specifically.

Remember what happened with netbooks? I fully expect that when MS ships Win8 on tablets, that a similar thing will happen to the tablet/slate market.

Put it this way: If Microsoft was to ship (either itself or through partners) tablet devices that last 10 hours on a single charge and offer a great touch experience and yet are able to run full MS Office, Lync/Communicator/Messenger, any WinPhone app/game and sports a "tablet mode" UI with dockable live tiles as it's primary "home" experience, I'll be delighted.

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