There's nothing really new about that...
There have been both desktops and laptops with touch screens around for many years! And there have been various very useful applications for them too.
Then there's ofcourse the touch-screen driven windows mobile devices. The only difference this time is that the interaction design is no longer only focussed on operation with a mouse, pen, or keyboard.

But then again, a lot of the newer stuff from microsoft, such as windows media center for instance, already has an interface perfectly fit to be operated by the touch of a finger.
The only slightly new-ish thing is the support for multi-point touch technology. It's similar to the touch screen/table thingy m$ released numerous months ago, and the features praised for windows 7, are just ported over from that touch screen/table... so its not really truely new either.

And then there's ofcourse apple who have been working on such screens for many years and iphone and ipod touch are operated with touch screens also for about a year now. HTC (Qtek) also has a smart phone with touch screen.

It's all nice and such, i'm not gunna bash the potential usefulness of this technology in certain situations, but for m$ to say its really a new development of m$ is basically just bullshit. And besides that, its still a feature thats utterly useless to most windows user out there, because almost no one has a touch screen...

There are much more important matters to be fixed. For one, the interface could seriously use some de-cluttering, that really should be a prime objective in my opinion. Then there should be some serious debugging on the new networking that has been introduced in Vista. They should make an IE8 that actually executes html and css correctly (i know the current beta of IE8 is better then IE7, but its still not satisfactory). They should update file previewing to get on par with apple. They should finally introduce multiple desktops (i mean seriously, that feature is at LEAST a decade overdue). And then there's a bunch of features they've supposedly been working on since windows 2000, yet still havent reached the market! They also should introduce updates and installations that dont require you to reboot as often as they do now. And they should work on making OOXML standard-worthy.

(_/)
(='.'=)
(")(")This is Bunny. Copy and paste bunny into your signature to help him gain world domination.