At the iPad 2 launch this week, Steve Jobs unveiled his new and slightly annoying favourite catchphrase: post-PC. I say slightly annoying, because it’s clearly tech buzzword bingo fodder; but, unlike the astonishingly irritating ‘magical’ (Does the iPad do tricks, joining Penn and Teller in Vegas? No it bloody well doesn’t.), post-PC makes sense: we’re entering a world where the typical PC is no longer the star of the show.

Microsoft is currently almost dead in the water in this area of computing, thrashing around, clinging to a half-deflated lifeboat with ‘Nokia’ spray-painted on the side, and lunging half-heartedly for a favourite possession: a book entitled We Will Love Windows Forever.

Bloomberg reports Microsoft’s cunning plan to rescue itself from sinking to the bottom of the ocean and being eaten by iSharks and myriad Android fishes with pointy teeth is as follows:

[Microsoft] won’t release a competitor to Apple Inc. and Google Inc.’s tablet operating systems until the 2012 back-to- school season, people with knowledge of the plans said.

Public testing of a new version of Windows will begin at the end of this year with partners and customers, said the people, who declined to be identified because the plans haven’t been disclosed publicly.

As Bloomberg notes, this will likely pitch whatever Microsoft comes up with against the iPad 3; frankly, its tablet plans had better be nothing short of spectacular or the post-PC world will also be post-Microsoft.