To me, "you can’t give iOS apps even the option to run continuously" is precisely the same as "discarded applications will continue to stay open [...] but unabl

To me, "you can’t give iOS apps even the option to run continuously" is precisely the same as "discarded applications will continue to stay open [...] but unable to schedule CPU time" indeed. At no point the article says Metro would not have such a feature. The point is merely that you can't have outstanding energy management with runaway background processes, which is the way desktop apps work today, so having a full-blown desktop running legacy apps on a mobile experience is compromising power management. Side note regarding "you can leave a torrent downloading in the background": see task completion API on iOS, which fills the use case while eliminating undue battery use.