User interfaces are necessarily shaped by the input devices we use to interact with them. I'd be interested in seeing some reviews of Metro from people who are

User interfaces are necessarily shaped by the input devices we use to interact with them. I'd be interested in seeing some reviews of Metro from people who are using the MS Touch mouse rather than a standard mouse. Perhaps Metro is designed with them in mind, so complaining about metro sucking with a standard mouse might be a little bit like complaining that the earliest versions of Windows were hard to use with just a keyboard! The move from DOS to Windows was very much one based on the addition of a mouse. Sure, some DOS applications could use a mouse, but it was not a necessary device for interacting with the operating system. Windows changed that. Yes, I know you could do almost anything in Windows with keyboard shortcuts, but it was painfully counter-intuitive to try doing so. Since then, the mouse and keyboard have remained more or less unchanged. The underlying technology has improved (e.g. optical vs ball mice) or deteriorated (most modern keyboards vs an IBM Model M), but their capabilities have remained almost frozen in time. The last major degree of freedom to be introduced and widely adopted was scroll-wheels. Some mice have other degrees of freedom, such as horizontal scrolling capabilities or zoom wheels, but none of these have become standards across all mice. Interfaces have gradually coaxed richer interactions out of those existing degrees of freedom, but that's it. Touch mice offer new degrees of freedom that traditional mice do not have. e.g. Gestures. If MS is smart, they are planning to develop Metro along lines that will exploit those new degrees of freedom. It will likely take years or decades for touch mice to reach their full potential but, if the people at MS have done their job well, there should already be compelling advantages to using them with Windows 8.