Just a guess, but Microsoft makes a lot of money from Office so I suspect the Office group insisted on being there at release to show existing customers their c

Just a guess, but Microsoft makes a lot of money from Office so I suspect the Office group insisted on being there at release to show existing customers their commitment. No doubt there are currently a lot of restrictions about what you can do on a WOA desktop, they may not have even provided anything like the full Win32 API. It wouldn't surprise me to see them loosen up those restrictions eventually. Plus, by keeping all the desktop utilities like Explorer and Control Panel as desktop apps in WOA it reduces the amount of work that needs to be done. When Windows 8 is being used on a desktop PC you'll want those to still be desktop apps, and they probably won't be used enough on a tablet to justify rewriting them all as Metro applets.