I agree. But sometimes, you just can't make it easy enough for everybody. iPhoto for iPad is probably the nicest iPad app I've ever seen, and it has a tooltipy

I agree. But sometimes, you just can't make it easy enough for everybody. iPhoto for iPad is probably the nicest iPad app I've ever seen, and it has a tooltipy help system because it's humanely impossible to create something as powerful as iPhoto for iPad that's also intuitive. Sometimes you need a gentle nudge in the right direction. Now, I personally dislike Metro very, very much. But the "charms" idea seems nice. How you tell the user (that's just started using Win8) how to activate a charm without a tooltip (or something similar)? Tell the user once (or twice), and only after that it becomes intuitive.