Nice review. I've spent the last 6 weeks working on a Windows 8 app. I've been using a dell box and samsung tablet with visual studio and a wired mouse/wireless keyboard so I can speak first hand about what it's like to use the 'desktop' part of Windows 8 for serious work.
Disclaimer: I've been a web developer for 4 years and have used a Mac during that whole time. Before that the only experience I had with windows was a typing class in high school and casually using it at people's houses. I don't have a bunch of Windows experience. This was the first native windows app that I've ever created. Also I've been using a full blown copy of WIndows 8 which is different than WinRT. Any of the mentions of 'desktop' software below won't run on a WinRT device.
Truthfully I'm not entirely sold on the idea of having a full blown computer in a tablet. Sure if was convenient for me to travel with the tablet and then when I got to a desk just plug in a mouse and attach a wireless keyboard but something still seemed incorrect.
More than once I was showing a workmate some code and absentmindedly touched the screen which highlighted the code and rearranged the order or cut it to the clipboard. Granted I'll develop the muscle memory to deal with that issue over time but I thought it worth noting that my initial reaction to having a 'full' computer on a tablet was negative.
Though I agree with you 100% that there is more "Windows" in here than we've been led to believe. In fact I found that only when launching apps did I interact with the metro start screen. Other than that I could just alt+tab right past it. All of the apps that I was using (sans the app that I was actually developing) were 'desktop' apps: Internet Explorer 10, File Explorer, Visual Studio 2012, cigwin and Tortoise SVN.
FWIW I like the traditional desktop version of IE10 much better than the new metro version of IE10. Which version of IE10 do you prefer? Have you done any app development?
The app that we created was built on the HTML5/CSS3/Javascript stack.Just like a webapp you build the UI in HTML/CSS and wire it together with javascript. There's a suite of UI elements in the WinJS.UI namespace that you can quickly build the UI with. You can also access the hardware and the Windows Runtime from javascript APIs.
The development experience was a real eye opener. The high level take away is that all the talk over the past 5 years about HTML5 eventually being used to create applications that could rival their native counterparts is finally coming to fruition.
You can build a Windows 8 app in either the native or the web stack and they will have nearly 100% feature parity. I've been considering making the switch from being a web developer to being a native app developer recently because I've been feeling limited by the browser. I've just wanted to get deeper access to the hardware and the OS and windows 8 fulfils that need.
Unfortunately they completely mangle the DOM and inject insane amounts of useless markup and attribute/values which make the semantic web geek inside of you die a little each time the app compiles and runs.
A small example--in my code I had a button that was a child of a div. It was literally two lines of HTML. After the app 'built' I couldn't get an event listener that was listening for an event on the child button to fire.
I used the DOM inspector to check out what was happening and not only had the compiler injected about 20 lines of html around each of my elements complete with dozens of data-foo attributes—it didn't even maintain the parent/child relationship from my markup! You can imagine how disconcerting it is to doubt that the core relationships of your markup aren't going to be maintained.
If you have time check out the app I helped created-Trulia for Windows 8: http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-US/app/trulia-real-estat...
