That sounds... difficult. :)
If it coulda worked, Steve would have done an OEM and slapped Axiotron with a lawsuit.
1) Rewrite explorer.exe to work on a slate. A big effort, but probably just on the scale of WP7 or iOS. This gives you a good high-level shell experience for doing things like finding files, launching apps, etc....
2) Make a great touch screen keyboard. Probably make a handful of them, so the user can try various kinds and make the default the one they like the most. Note, Windows handwriting recognition is already quite good.
3) Add a touch-friendly shell on IE9. The shell is already minimalist -- this is pretty incremental work.
4) Make touch-friendly versions of all the built-in Windows apps (notepad, wmp, control panel, etc...). This maybe a large work item, so use telemetry data to hit the 20 most popular apps first.
5) Make Office touch friendly. It's actually surprisingly touch friendly now.
6) Get the top 100 apps and work with vendors on making them finger-friendly. Entice with money where necessary. Targets here would be Chrome, Firefox, Photoshop, iTunes, Zune, VLC, WinZip, Quicktime, TurboTax, Adobe Reader, Mathematica, etc... I suspect the conversion ratio won't be super high, but you'll move what you can.
7) Create a touch app store.
Now this won't be perfect, but I suspect it will be a pretty tremendous start, coupled with OakTrail. This probably would seriously cannibalize the netbook market. I'd probably even get one.
And most of what you wrote is what Apple did with iOS, it's actually just Mac OS X with the GUI torn off completely.
Really, a touch API for .NET would go a long way for promoting it in tech circles. The problem is that the bosses are in love with iPads.
Mono for Android, maybe.
WPF 4.0 has touch support, and seems pretty full-featured as far as I can tell. The problem I have building .NET apps is that I don't know anyone with a Windows touch device. It's hard for me to want to add touch support, given I have no customers for it. Although if MS paid me for my time... :-)
Which reminds me of one more thing for the list... Win8Touch needs to be able to run WP7 Silverlight apps. The market needs to be seeded with touch apps in order for the tablet to take off. This was THE most important thing Apple did for the iPad (followed very closely by incredible battery life).
And heh, looks like Microsoft took a little bit of direction from cocoa touch in naming their classes "UIElement"
.NET apps would be a lot more valuable for in-house applications, although, Apple's 299/yr enterprise license takes a bit of air out of that.
Numerous tablets were made before the iPad. They were all completely unusable. They were all “designed” by people with your mindset.
If someone asked you to design the first sofa, you’d suggest bolting three kitchen chairs together and letting the client choose what type of bolt to use. The resulting “design” would be inevitably awful, because it isn’t designed at all – rather than examining the phase space of possible solutions, it examines what you happen to have lying around on the workbench.
Having no sense of design isn’t a great personal failing. I’m not much of a designer myself. Everyone’s bad at something – most things, in fact. Not realizing you don’t have it can be a problem, though.
The key question is, what is missing from my suggestion? The internals of the iPad are basically a computer. Like literally, you can probably rip off the shell and put a Mac OS like shell on it. That's how Apple designed the iPhone too.
It's really simply an issue of the shell and the ecosystem. Note, MS didn't take this approach with all of the other tablets that existed. They did NOT change the shell nor attempt to change the ecosystem.
Now maybe you think Apple sucks at design too and the iPhone and the iPad are total failings. I think many would think otherwise.
Not being a bad designer isn't a failing. But being able to recognize that you're talking to someone who does understand design could be a problem. :-)
I think that's a big mistake. While I love WebOS, I have even less desire to buy it on a Slate than I do iOS. I don't want my phone but bigger, I want my computer but smaller. My guess is the first real competitor to the iPad will be the one that lets you run actual Windows and somehow programmatically makes everything touch-friendly.