I'm not so sure that the need for touch is really that great in a desktop environment. It's probably cool for someone looking over your shoulder and wanting to take control of your computer. But for sitting at the computer and making something happen... I don't think the usability needs to be 'equal'. And in the desktop world it should favor the keyboard/mouse.

Here's an anecdote for touch vs. mouse/keyboard:

Pretty sure I'm not - nor is my family setup - typical of a windows user. We have two touchscreen desktops in our house.

I have a two year old that can work the touchscreen very proficiently. My 5 & 7 year old stick with the mouse and never use the touch, I almost never use touch, and my wife rarely uses it.

Based on my personal observations, on the desktop, touch is good for very new users or those who lack the physical coordination to control the mouse and keyboard. Otherwise, mouse and keyboard wins.

The Windows 8 mouse experience is really lacking at the moment. I expect that gets a major update in the next version.

I agree with you, that was the point of my post. I think that touch interfaces and desktop interfaces can stay distinct or complementary. I think there is an expectation that Windows 8 must make a touch based app great in desktop mode and vice-versa which I think is untenable.

It's like old efforts to make cars and vans run on the same body. The cars handled like vans and the vans handled like awkward cars.

If you're looking to only use a mouse, I suspect you will be spending time in Desktop mode. I know that the CTP has enhanced the mouse support in RT mode, but it's still touch-first apps. I don't like tablets and don't love the nature of touch interfaces and I know that I will not be happy with a mouse and WinRT mode ever. Frankly, if the buttons and layouts are accommodating for touch interfaces, it's NOT going to be optimal for use with a mouse. (I think some additional evidence of this would be the intrusion of ribbon into Windows Explorer. IMO it's pretty obvious that it's motivated by touch interface needs.)

I think there is a lot they can do to make moving between metro and the desktop less jarring. They could very easily skin the desktop away from faux 3d glossy semitransparent things to solid colors for window borders and menus with clean edges, icons, and text.

In the developer preview it looked awful to have the black windows button on the aqua 3d suparbar. Why not just make the whole thing black? I think the desktop would look great with solid white / colored windows over a good photo.

that looks like it provides pretty much the same functionality as the start menu.

Windows 8 is looking like such a failure.

Cardapio (in most major Linux distros) is almost always, at most, two levels deep, categorized by app, and doesn't include a per-app folder including 6 different shortcuts, readme, uninstaller, etc. It's much cleaner to skim through, it's much easier to find, say, an "Internet" application out of all of them installed, has search and favorite folders baked in.

It might be the same functionality, but that's not really saying much. Linux and Windows fundamentally offer the same functionality.