Let me clear up some confusion:
Longhorn will not take up 1 TB of hard drive space. Those of you who interpreted the article in that way should re-evaluate your reading skills. The article merely said that the average computer at the time of Longhorn's release will have a 1 TB hard drive which is very plausible considering Hitachi just brought out a 400 GB hard drive. Those who are still going on about how Windows is bloatware because Windows 95 took up 150 MB of a 1 GB hard drive, you need to accept that things have changed. The average hard drive size now is about 80 GB and Windows XP takes up about 1.5 to 2 GB including the page/hibernate file. I think it's also worth a mention that a full install of Mac OS X Panther takes up more room than a full install of Windows XP, and that Mac OS X generally has a larger footprint in ram than Windows.
It's true that Mac OS X already has a hardware-accelerated user interface, but how is Microsoft's inclusion of one in Longhorn "copying"? I'd say it's on par with Macs adopting PCI slots or Macs adopting a driver-based system architecture, neither of which I consider "copying" but instead just inevitable technological advancements. The new hardware-accelerated interface renderer (not the new interface itself) is already present in the new 4074 build and enabling it is simple, as this news post explains:
http://www.neowin.net/comments.php?id=19692&category=main.
Moore's law also won't be broken any time soon. It might not be Intel itself who is churning out the processors to keep it going but AMD and IBM are doing a pretty good job at it. As for Quake not running on the HP demo PC, I think it was a fluke as they claimed. I was able to play Far Cry just fine in Longhorn build 4053 on my second PC, which is a Duron 1.8 GHz with 512 MB ram and a Geforce FX 5200.
As for Longhorn being designed for high resolutions, it doesn't mean that screens will be huge or that everything will become tiny. Microsoft is anticipating that screens will have a much higher DPI than they do now and Longhorn will take advantage of this by dynamically scaling depending on the screen's size and resolution.
Once again, I'd just like to say that the hardware specs mentioned in the article are only what the speculated average will be at the time of Longhorn's release. They are not the minimum requirements and Longhorn is being to designed with different "modes" so that it can run on older systems less the eye candy among other things. Right now, Mac OS X's minimum requirements lock out a lot more or hardware than those of Windows XP, and I've used XP on a P233 with 64 MB (for which Windows has a special undocumented mode where it will be extremely memory conservative and only take up about 50 MB).
