[addabox]

I guess what I'm thinking about is that if (and it does seem this way to me) touch is the future, someone is going to have to be very, very smart about how to do the kind of fine grained stuff we take for granted in a big range of desktop apps.

Right now, the solution seems to be "limit functionality to the broader strokes", but that will have to change.

It looks to me like Apple is going to have the edge here, because they are developing iOS as an environment in its own right, whereas MS is trying to have it both ways. If Metro coexists with Windows 8 desktop stuff, and the desktop stuff can do a good job of handling the heavy lifting, there's little incentive to figure out how to Metro-fy, say, Photoshop.

Now of course you could say that Apple is doing the same thing, jut a little more bifurcated, since OS X soldiers on and anyone wanting to run Photoshop on an Apple device can certainly use a Mac. But because iOS is its own deal, the iPad is its own deal, and the more popular the iPad becomes the more incentive there is to make any and every app for the platform. An Intel tablet is always going to have old school fallback, and apparently an all Metro/ARM tablet will have Office in some form that doesn't actually make the big leap to full Metro-hood, so it looks like even MS is unwilling to do the hard work to figure out how make big apps finger friendly.