I see it as they're en route to saving money by offloading as much as possible of the underlying OS in Windows to Linux, and only keeping the 'front end' of Win

I see it as they're en route to saving money by offloading as much as possible of the underlying OS in Windows to Linux, and only keeping the 'front end' of Windows as in-house development. They get the 'effect' of Windows for Joe Public, at a fraction of Microsoft's cost. In other words, Microsoft is doing in 2020 what Apple did with their OSX way back in 2001.