The key word is 'few'.
Congratulations you are no longer the target audience for the OS. Instead MS have decided to setup an OS experiance for the people who do want a tablet to do those things, or do want to connect with their XBox and who don't want to worry about where their data is living.

Even from a developer standpoint, I could see touch having a serious impact. You can do a lot of things on a tablet very naturally and quickly than you can with a mouse and keyboard. On my current convertible tablet with windows 7 I can still do some things that go very rapidly compared to when I try to do them elsewhere. Moving/resizing windows and zooming are decent examples. I actually under-utilize the features because I'm so used to kb/m I often forget I also have a touch screen. It's miles better than a touchpad that's for sure.

I've been thinking about trying to make an interface with the kinect to treat monitors as touch screens without you having to be within arms length of the monitors, and something like that I think could be really cool. I've been too busy on it, but you just need to do eye tracking and have the user calibrate it so it knows where the screens are. Then just project the screens onto a plane that's about arms length away from the user and you can see exactly what they are pointing at and when they tap it.

Stuff like this is the next step in NUI imo. Being able to point and say, "What's that?" etc. is an awesome possibility.

Yes, except you have no start menu, and except simple tasks like double-clicking "My Computer" and browsing your hard drive don't work the same way any more

The start menu functionality is still generally there, you just get to it differently as "Start" has been rebranded to be the home screen. If you hover over the start button and click I think "Search" you get essentially the same functionality as the start button in windows 7.

Look, I'm not saying anything against Windows 8 for tablets. Not in any way. Run the same programs that you know at home and on the way? Sure, cool. Heck, I would have to be crazy not wanting that. What I oppose to, however, is turning a desktop into a tablet, simply because that is not what it is, and that is not what works well.[/quote]
I think you are mistaking "What works well" with "What you are used to". A lot of people had similar complaints when they introduced the ribbon into Word. What they didn't realize is that the number of clicks to get to the top 50 functions used in Word/Office were cut in half. People still hated it just because it was different.

It would be perfectly good if they just did the same operating system (including the touchscreen drivers and some special power saver features and whatnot, if you will), but shipped with a normal "frontend" (desktop, taskbar, whatever) suitable for a desktop. [/quote]
They already have windows 7 tablets.

Well yes, in my Windows 7 install, the totally useless game explorer is available somewhere, I would have to search to actually find it. The bottom line from what you get when you turn it on is: "This is a computer, and besides, you can play games too, and we built in parental control". The bottom line under Windows 8 from what you're presented when you turn it on is: "Yo tis haz da kool blinkin lights toyz, play games and twitter and upload kool stoof to Facebook".

Sure enough, if you spend a few days, I'm sure you can turn Windows 8 into something usable on a desktop machine, too.[/quote]
If you spend 20 seconds (not a few days) you can remove all the "blinkin lights toys, play games and twitter and upload kool stoof to Facebook" from your start screen.

Company trust rant.
[/quote]
Go set your laptop down on a beach in hawaii and walk away. Tell me how easy it is to get your data back. Tell me the steps you'd take to get said data back. I'm assuming you'd go to the police, they'd see if you had some sort of lojack thing on your computer (which won't work unless the burglar is an idiot), and 5 days after the burglar has sold your laptop to his hacker friend all those emails, pictures, and letters you talk about are either sold to the highest bidder or totally wiped so your laptop can be resold.

It's easy to see the risks of having a company take care of your data, but you CAN NOT IGNORE THE RISKS OF HAVING PHYSICAL MEDIA IN YOUR POSSESSION. From personal experience people fuck up data they have on their person a lot more than any company ever has online. The one time I was defrauded with my credit card it was from using it at a local restaurant with a shady employee, not when Steam or XBL got hacked. Look at how many people tweet/facebook about coffee spills on laptops every year. I think it would be at least competitive with the amount of leaked information you find in these hacking attempts.

Heh, nice to see the original question devolve into a OS war. To be fair I prefer IOS5 to android and own devices with both, but my primary is Galaxy S - if IPhone had more variety in hardware I'd switch my phone in a heartbeat. Physical keyboard please, it's ok if it's .2" thicker!

But as far as the original question about whether there's ecosystem lock, the answer is an easy no. Any mid to large business will pay the extra $ to target both platforms, unless it's cost-prohibitive to do so. In my case I made the decision to go android-exclusive because I prefer Java development tools and didn't care to buy a mac (though I have every other apple device).

Perhaps Autodesk is unwilling to make a large enough investment in it's mobile presence that they aren't targeting both platforms (it is always more expensive to target both, especially so if you're doing lots of low level API stuff), or maybe they just have such a captive audience that they can get away with targeting a single platform. At my mid-size company our graphics designers requested tablets specifically for a single piece of software they wanted to use, it wouldn't have made a difference which platform it was on because the company bought the tablets for the software.