Fighting talk from Dan Grabham over at TechRadar in Windows 8 could make you rethink buying iPad 3:

An iPad isn’t a do-everything device. Windows 8 tablets will be

Of course, it remains to be seen if Windows 8 tablets are do-everything well devices. Given that many apps will still be designed for mouse pointers rather than touch, I doubt that will be the case.

Despite slow sales, Windows Phone is a surprisingly good phone OS. If you’re guffawing at that last sentence, we reckon you probably haven’t used it.

I totally agree with Grabham here. I’ve only used Windows Phone briefly a few times, but I was impressed with what Microsoft has done. The UI is interesting and, importantly, Redmond didn’t just rip-off Apple’s iOS, unlike pretty much everyone else in the smartphone race. The system being called Windows Phone is fucking stupid, though, and hints at problems Microsoft has in moving on from its past.

Microsoft’s new OS has a potentially game-changing trick up its sleeve. Microsoft isn’t redesigning the Windows that we all know. Indeed, Windows 8 will have a desktop that’s actually very similar to Windows 7. But it will be overlaid by the Windows Phone-style interface. Two operating systems in one, you might say. And that’s actually going to propel Windows 8 devices past their competitors in terms of do-it-all devices.

That actually sounds extremely risky. Mac OS X and iOS share certain aspects of architecture, but they are each designed from the ground up to be suitable for the interfaces of the hardware they run on. Having a single operating system run across traditional computers and tablets is an extremely challenging prospect. Kudos to Microsoft if they pull this off and ‘force’ software creators to make their products work brilliantly with pointers and touch, but I worry Windows 8 will be the same old Windows on the desktop, and also the same old Windows on a tablet, just with a touch skin overlay that works really well for very few applications.

As John Gruber deftly points out in Why Windows 8 Is Fundamentally Flawed as a Response to the iPad:

[I]t’s a fundamentally flawed idea for Microsoft to build their next-generation OS and interface on top of the existing Windows. The idea is that you get the new stuff right alongside Windows as we know it. Microsoft is obviously trying to learn from Apple, but they clearly don’t understand why the iPad runs iOS, and not Mac OS X.

Microsoft’s demo video shows [the full version of] Excel running alongside new touch-based apps. They can make buttons more ‘touch friendly’ all they want, but they’ll never make Excel for Windows feel right on a touchscreen UI. Consider the differences between the iWork apps for the Mac and iPad. The iPad versions aren’t ‘touch friendly”’ versions of the Mac apps — they’re entirely new beasts designed and programmed from the ground up for the touchscreen and for the different rules and tradeoffs of the iOS interface

Gruber claims that the ability to run Mac OS X apps on the iPad, with full access to the file system and other Mac conventions, would make the iPad worse, and that the device is popular due to it eliminating complexity. I think he’s right—in keeping complexity under the hood, Apple has made a system that is so intuitive even toddlers can happily use it. I find it hard to see how Microsoft will be able to do the same with Windows 8, if it remains the same old Windows. Windows Phone, on the other hand, was exactly the right foundation to build on for next-generation Microsoft, so it’s only natural Redmond is marginalising it in favour of ‘proper’ Windows.

Grabham again:

Finally, Windows can emerge from the shadow of the PC as we know it.

And yet remain in the shadow of Windows as we know it.