I thoroughly agree with this. If they know what they have to replicate, they can do it in style. I can't find three significant points of conceptual difference between Windows 8 Metro and iOS....
available mouse pointer.......... ummm..... more colors?
Meanwhile: mandatory revokable code signing. no side-loading. centralized apps. restrictive filesystem. fullscreen by default. centralized homepage. everything-is-an-app. sliding pane navigation. implied scrollbars. ARM SOC hardware. on and on and on and on, it's a direct clone of what's working in the marketplace.
The problem is that other browsers keep defining what a browser should be, and then Microsoft has to play catch-up. Same with Windows Phone and Windows 8: other people defined what a mobile OS should do, and now MS is trying to catch up.
When you're not defining the market, you're an also-ran. Microsoft in the last 10 years failed abysmally at defining new markets, which is what they had done with Win95/Win2000 first and then Office and VisualStudio and IE5 later (yes, IE5 was commercially fantastic -- there's a reason all those shitty "web-apps" from 2001 were not written for Netscape or Mozilla).
In this sense, Windows 8 is more of the same: other people pointed the way, and MS is now scrambling to imitate them as best as they can. Not a recipe for success, if you ask me.