(This is just a quick reply this morning, Andy is doing great at covering most of my position on the subject)


Why don't you have access to your filesystem in OS X? Seems perfectly accessible to me, using Finder or Terminal.


I don't personally see the problem here as long as usability is good. I will say Microsoft does appear to be going too far with Windows 8 and the Metro interface when a keyboard and mouse is present. Too much of it seems to require gestures that aren't very discoverable. But I'll hold off final judgement on the release preview. Been running the Developer and Community betas to keep an eye on the other side. And I do think it works well on a tablet.

As for Apple though, I don't think they are going to far at this point. My OS X machine still mostly works the same as it did when 10.0 came out (or in many ways, much better). Sure, Launchpad is there for users who want an iOS tablet launcher. But it's not forced like what Microsoft is choosing to do. The other "Tablet" features such as auto save and crash recover seem like a good thing to me. And the other tablet feature I can think that they brought over to the Air at least is standby time measured in months. Again, can't really see anything wrong with that. I'm also completely comfortable with the trackpad replacing the mouse for everything outside of gaming on my Mac. That's all I can think of in the way Apple is bringing tablet components to the desktop. They recognize the devices are two separate things, and aren't trying to mash them into one like their competitors.