The practicality of that might not be guaranteed. Are there platforms that have the unofficial client but no official client?

In what way? Pair a Bluetooth keyboard and plug in an HDMI monitor, and the phone's touch screen ought to become the trackpad of a computer with a desktop-style window management policy.

In theory, you can get a developer license without charge to privately deploy self-made apps onto an Internet-connected Windows RT device. Like the Steam receipt cache, a Windows developer license expires after a month but can be renewed without charge indefinitely.

Because the OS platform is still relevant. Some people still want to run lightweight desktop applications on a 10" laptop, even if they have to buy a tablet with a keyboard. "Mobile" operating systems don't run desktop applications. Or should people buy an Android tablet, install an X server, and recompile their applications for Linux/ARM?

At that point, you're just using the Super NES as a power supply and controller reader.

Better yet, go all Saturn, dropping the old hardware entirely because an S-Video output and SPI inputs are probably cheaper than all that circuitry to interface with the legacy console. That's what led Sony to success with PlayStation: it skipped the 32X stage.

Not all programs can export without substantial loss of data. For example, can Garage Band export a multitrack project in a neutral file format that a multitrack audio editor for a non-Apple operating system will recognize? Can Photoshop export a file with all layers and all adjustment layers that Krita or GIMP can open?

I fully agree with you that the moral hazards associated with policies advocating wide use of deceptively inflexible software and hardware are nowhere near those of the National Socialist party. But the general reasoning still stands: First $whatever_authoritarians came for the people in situation A, but I shut up because I was not in situation A at the moment. Likewise for those in situations B and C. By the time they came for people in my situation, the tradition of speaking only for your own exact situation was so ingrained that there weren't enough people speaking for my situation, and my livelihood ended up written off as acceptable collateral damage.

The other reason is my programmer mentality. As a programmer, I need to be aware of how my code behaves in situations other than the most common one. These situations are called the edge cases. A program is more reliable if it handles edge cases correctly, and a policy is more complete if it provides for edge cases.

Or, as the articles I linked describe, you know contingent on the integrity of the rest of your visuospatial environment. Different people process their surroundings in different ways.

Which is really all anyone ever wanted in 8.

That would be an improvement. Even better is if the Start screen could be "snapped" the way every other Modern UI app can, or if the Start screen's tiles showed up over a dimmed version of whatever desktop or Modern UI app I was using the way Dashboard works in OS X. Microsoft could have thought of plenty of ways to preserve context among desktop applications, Modern UI applications, and the Start screen, but it didn't.

A major context switch is fine from one task to another completely separate task, such as the task of watching videos. If I'm watching a video for entertainment, then of course I'll put it in the full screen as the task consists solely of that video. But if I'm reviewing a video or watching an instructional video, I'm going to want to have the ability to take it down into a window so that I can have the video on one side and notes on the other. Same if I'm trying to follow or make a walkthrough in a game. But if I'm doing audio work and I want to quickly pull up a calculator to estimate a piece's BPM, I want the calculator added to my current visuospatial context, not to be yanked away from it.

Yet while my eyes refocus to put the Start menu in front of my fovea, the previous visual context is streaking by. And once I get there, the fact that the things in my peripheral vision have not changed reminds me of where I am in the task. I can glance back and forth between Start and the task if I still need to check back.

In what way are fighting games for consoles "artifically crippled"? For example, how would mouse and keyboard provide an advantage over a gamepad?

Copy bandwidth between the A bus (main memory and the cartridge) and the the B bus (the PPU and the edge connector) is 2.7 MB/s, but then you have to copy it back out to video memory. You could put the copy source on the cart A bus, but then you still get only 2.7 MB/s to fill video memory. You can write to memory only during vertical blanking, which is about 6 KiB worth of copying. The Super Game Boy accessory got away with it because a 160x144 pixel frame at 2bpp fits into 6 KiB.

My USB TV tuner begs to differ.

You could search for programs in Windows 7's Start menu, just without a full screen covering up all visual cues related to what you're working on.

It sounds like you've never had to refer to instructions in a help file or other documentation for starting a particular application or system utility. In that case, either A. you aren't a member of the Administrators group on any of the Windows 8 computers you use and thus have had little need to refer to system administration documentation, B. you have a desktop PC and multiple monitors and enough desk space for all of them, and can thus afford to keep the help file on a separate monitor, or C. you haven't been using Windows 8 for any involved tasks.

Human beings have "very limited cognitive capacity to begin with" especially when most of it is being used by a task. When I'm starting an additional application for a given step of my current task, I don't want any unnecessary distractions, and having everything related to my current task disappear entirely from my field of view is a distraction. It'd be like having the content of the application window disappear when I press Alt+F to open the File menu. Perhaps for a minority of people, the phenomenon of the zone doesn't exist, and you belong to that minority. Otherwise, please cool it with the "you're holding it wrong" snark.

How would an end user discover A. that this is possible and B. what keywords to use on Google to learn how? Google custom taskbar menus brought me this page, which recommends a bunch of third-party software. Classic Shell is also third-party software.

As Anonymous Coward wrote in this comment: "You can use Jump Lists from apps pinned to the Taskbar in Windows 8 but having 10+ apps pinned to your Taskbar tends to make it needlessly cluttered, especially when you have multiple non-pinned apps open at the same time."