But hey, you can use a tablet now that Microsoft's management have switched focus... to a market they have not much share in, almost no mindshare, little developer incentive to work on, that only contributes to a fraction of their revenue and with tools and an operating system that shoe-horns the much larger workstation market into a tablet interface that is neither intuitive or pleasant to work with.

Hats off to Microsoft, clearly someone in management knows more than their own marketplace. Sometimes to be a market leader you must ignore the needs and wants of the market, after all leaders need to make the market go where you want it, right?

I am as well. They were so close to propelling Ruby as the desktop language of choice. I remember how easy it was to program GUI in IronRuby...:

  button = Button.new
  button.text = 'Foo'
  button.location = Point.new(0,0)
  button.click {|sender, e| do_something}
  window.controls.add(button)

Makes Qt and Gtk look like over-engineered monstrosities.