Nice thought, but a majority of the Metro UI has been around since at least 2007 on Windows Media Center/Vista (including the fonts, a proto-version of the tiles, and many other familiar elements).

Compared to the alternatives on Windows, Powershell is extremely powerful, but it does have a pretty steep learning curve. There are a lot of niceties that make me never want to go back to bash or batch (shudder)- killer auto-completion on args (even extends to argument names and values if the right metadata is provided by the cmdlet), verbose and useful error messaging on many things, easy consumption of arbitrary .NET objects from script (resulting in a *huge* 3rd party ecosystem out of the box), etc.

The interesting part is that a lot of the internal admin tools on newer versions of Windows (and associated server apps like Exchange) are built on top of Powershell, so you can use the UI for basic stuff, then hit the "show me the script" button to get a Powershell script as a starting point for automating something. Similar to the workflow many people used for learning Office scripting ("record macro").

While I've not seen a major penetration of command-line-only scripting for Windows, having *everything* scriptable in a reasonable fashion (and enforcing that by building the UI tools on top of the script engine) is a great way to drive that penetration.

Multi-monitor Remote Desktop (which kicks the hell out of anything else for performance), PPTP/L2TP/SSTP VPN in the box, fast-user switching- what more do you need to make an OS "conducive for telecommuting"? Works fantastically for me...

Except for those that are *part* of the "dying media industry" (think Comcast/NBC Universal and TimeWarner). Same kinds of internal conflict that Sony has for being a provider of devices that can infringe on copyright and a producer of copyrighted content. Guess which side wins (have a look at Sony's crippled devices)?

If it's not already clear, darn tootin' the next version of the volume license agreement will contain the "OnLive" clause that expressly forbids it...

"Insightful?" .NET's not interpreted- get your facts straight. People can write crap in every environment- give .NET to a skilled dev that understands where its power lies, and he'll build you something incredible, performant, and do it quickly. Give it to an idiot, and you'll see the same crap the idiot would write in C++ or any other language, you'll just probably see the end result a little sooner.

Stop the violator!

"If someone alters your password not through the normal password change process (i.e. an Administrator uses 'reset password'), you lose access to your private keys, and thus your encrypted files."

This is only true for local (eg, non-domain) accounts. Domain account passwords can be changed administratively without affecting the keys.