MS did not disclose the full WinRT story at Build and thats obviously causing confusion.
The focus at Build was exclusively on Metro apps for tablets.
However, Metro apps are certainly not the whole WinRT story.
Give it some time and the other shoe will drop and MS will tell us the Metro-desktop story as well (and, chances are, the Metro-server story).
The so called immersive applications dont work on large monitors.
Just imagine the FilePicker window, for example, taking the entire screen on a 24-30 desktop monitor ??? No UI designer in their right mind would consider this to be a good, user-friendly interface.
We are way past the DOS years and Im pretty confident that what we saw at Build is not what MS has in mind for desktop applications.
I guess MS is not ready with the Metro-desktop story/vision yet.
And in order to bring a tablet-friendly OS to market ASAP, MS is will release Windows 8 with this dual-split personality.
Looking forward, though, there will be a new desktop UI as well.
WinRT's design is very, very solid. This is the third generation of COM (after the original OLE/COM and then .Net) - and MS really got it right this time.
Im guessing that this whole redesign of the Windows foundation was needed so that Windows can be run on any device.
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