From what I understand of the (very preliminary) plans for 8 is to integrate some of the elements from Surface, finally do away with the registry, and hide much

From what I understand of the (very preliminary) plans for 8 is to integrate some of the elements from Surface, finally do away with the registry, and hide much of the filesystem from the end user among other things that may be more or less surprising to some. Backwards compatibility will still hang around in the form of virtualization. Microsoft is still an innovative company that needs to do a better job fast tracking R&D to real world applications.