The big mistake Microsoft made with Win 8 is that they caused their users the pain of changing the user interface without streamlining what is underneath – Win 8 still has a registry and the associated bloat. Microsoft really needs to do what Apple did with OS X – blow it up and start over with a small, fast core – Win 9, maybe?

RT tablets hace a chance to do well. A “Micosoft equivalent of the iPad” but with the ability to run Office could have a lot of buyers IF Microsoft has the patience to persuade developers to write for RT.

Full Win 8 tablets will flop totally (and I have owned a Win XP tablet). A full multuser, multitasking OS will NOT run well on the limited hardware of a tablet, any more than Windows 7 or Vista ran well on netbooks. The heat and battery issues will be very real, and the OS itself will take up a lot of disk space.

The few specs we have seen confirm this. 64GB is the smallest Pro model Microsoft will offer and the 2 lb. weight is presumably a very large battery (without a retina display to justify it), and the Core i5 processor it requires is going to cause heat issues. A first generation iPad, with 256MB of memory and a slow processor, runs quickly because the OS doesn’t make heavy demands on it. Just the opposite is true of Win 8. A 64GB Surface Pro is not going to be remotely as good a user experience as a 64GB iPad – not in speed, weight, or ease of use. These tablets are not going to sell even to enterprise when employees know that iPads exist, and I think this is true regardless of how well Windows 8 does in general.