As far as I can tell, the goal of Windows 8 is to have 2 kinds of UI: a traditional mouse/keyboard computer interface, and a touch-optimized Metro-derived inter

As far as I can tell, the goal of Windows 8 is to have 2 kinds of UI: a traditional mouse/keyboard computer interface, and a touch-optimized Metro-derived interface. Since Lion and the iPad have different interfaces, this doesn't seem obviously wrong to me, but perhaps I've misunderstood your point? The communication about the development platform has been awful. Almost no one seems to understand what they're doing at all, and Microsoft needs to own that problem and fix it. But Peter Bright over at Ars Technica has written several pieces about how everything we know seems to fit together, and it seems to boil down to: (1) C++ isn't going anywhere, (2) there's a huge base of .Net developers, and .Net isn't going anywhere either, (3) there's also a huge base of developers more used to web-standards based tools, and we don't want to make them learn .Net or C++, so there will be tools for them too, (4) there will be a new common UI layer for all of these to improve consistency.