Apple also locks down the iPad to allow me to only do with it what they bless as appropriate.

The Apple model is just different. It's not "the right way" it's just "the apple way." High emphasis on developing in secret and only showing a locked-down finished product.

The fact they are releasing an OS a year before it hits shelves allows millions of developers to get a crack at building new apps.

Apple has also been shipping iPads for the past 17 months.

How interested are developers going to be in developing apps for a "maybe" platform when they can be developing for an installed base of 50-odd million iPads right now? What if this is a TouchPad? It doesn't seem like a good bet on the tablet side given the history.

Windows is a "maybe" platform? cmon...

One of the most attractive aspects of this to me is that I would not be developing just for a single device tablet OS. The applications will run across both tablets and desktops, and even a Microsoft "failed" Windows release is sure to see a massive uptake, especially as it will be the default OS on the vast majority of new computers.

As a tablet it's a maybe platform.

It's not as if Microsoft haven't tried to do this before and failed and they're taking a pretty different approach to what's working in the market at the moment.

It's possible that Win 8 can be a success on the desktop / laptop but fail as a tablet OS.

On the flipside, you're more likely to be developing for a lot of different versions of that OS, and – over time – you'll be developing for the lowest common denominator among them.

The presenter struggles because on the one hand he has a camera and the other he uses to swipe/touch.

I'm not suggesting the beta/dev preview version is without bugs, I believe you're reading too much into this.

I'd argue that's "presentation" failure. This is something that can be practiced so as to keep the focus on the product and not on the sloppiness due to lack of preparedness.

I'd argue that you can hand an iPad to your grandmother with severe arthritis or your toddler for the first time and they wouldn't have nearly as much trouble as the presenter in the video.

Why would you give your grandmother a prototype tablet that will never see a production release?

Why would you demo a prototype?

Gee, I don't know...maybe to give the millions of people who are interested in it an idea of what it might be like.

You've got to wonder why Engadget can't invest in a tripod.

I might be confusing this video with the one on This Is My Next. I watched them both today.

I just watched it, and more than anything, it seemed like it was slow. It seemed like he would swipe and nothing would happen, so he would swipe again, but it was actually just that the tablet was still processing stuff, so then it would eventually process both gestures. I think it would be quite normal for a developer release to be slow.

As far as your point about whether Apple would allow people to see this, well, that's just the Microsoft vs Apple marketing philosophy. Apple typically presents things that are very highly polished and nearly complete, whereas Microsoft says "Hey, check out this thing we're working on." All else being equal (I'm not saying it is, but if it were), they both seem like viable strategies.