May I point out that during the rumor phase of the iPad, most people on this very forum were adamant that it run a fully capable OS X with a touch UI?
Little late in replying to this on account of needing sleep, but I wanted to note that while that's entirely true, it's also exactly what Microsoft has done wrong all these years. To them, as to most hardcore geeks (which are the majority of forum posters here, in comparison to the regular population), things break down into "real" OS and "Mobile"/toy OS, and if it doesn't run a "real" OS, it's not a real computer. It's why Microsoft--who sees Win7 Phone as their "make mobile life easier" OS and Win7 as their "real" OS--along with hundreds of tech writers and countless commenters around the web, mocked the iPad as doomed to fail--because it's not what
they wanted a computer to be, therefore it logically must not be what
anybody wants a computer to be, and therefore is stupid.
Which of course proved to be entirely wrong, because of course what the average, non-geek human wants a computer to be is very much not what the average geek wants, and Apple seems to be remarkably good at giving them exactly that. It's why my dad loves his iPad and uses it far more than his desktop, while I personally don't really have need for one right now.
Microsoft fundamentally misunderstands their customer base because of years of completely skewed viewpoint due to having a desktop OS monopoly. They think they know what people want, because people have been buying their product by the millions... they just can't seem to get it through their internal filter that this isn't because it's what people want, it's because it's
the only choice.
Actually, they are sort of getting it--Win7 Phone is enough of a departure that it at least shows that there's some intelligence left at the company, although based on past precedent I'm skeptical of how well they'll be able to capitalize on that, particularly lacking a monopoly to leverage. After all, the last time MS had to actually compete for a market was the console games one, and they certainly haven't become the sole dominating player in that space yet. Plus they only had three competitors, one of whom was already dying when they got into the space, and one of the remaining two has been working very hard at sawing its own legs off since.
An aside, I'll note that I, personally, didn't have the slightest doubt prior to the iPad's announcement that it would run iOS--there was just no way Apple was going to put the MacOS on a tablet when they had a full touchscreen OS they were already happy with. Nor, personally, was I so convinced that this was a bad thing.
