The extra $150 gets you Windows 8.1, a copy of Microsoft Office Home and Student, and the ability to run x86 apps from the world's biggest software ecosystem.

That may not be of any value to you, but it's certainly of value to businesses and individuals that live in and off Microsoft Office and a vast range of Windows utilities.

If you're into photography, for example, the ability to run Adobe Lightroom and other software with batch processing and bulk uploading from an 8in tablet is pretty compelling.

The premium price is $1 a week over three years. This isn't a lot if your time time has any value.

On the other hand, the Android ecosystem is getting better quickly, and the main thing that threatens it is kneecapping on the part of vendors.

For instance, the Kindle Fire is a good product line but it doesn't give you access to Google Play. Amazon won't let you watch Instant Video on stock Android devices, however, which just drove me to get a Netflix subscription.

Microsoft Office 365 Home is a great deal at $99 a year given that you can run Office on up to 5 Windows computers and up to 5 mobile devices... With the caveat that Microsoft doesn't offer a complete version of Office for Android.

CNBC lets you watch live TV on a iPad but not on Android. In many cases you see that vendors see Android as a threat but don't see iOS as a threat precisely because the iOS is perceived to be a niche market and that Android, in the long time, will eat everything by being cheap.

I would think that "with iOS, we have a place to go if people start cracking our software" plays a part, too. Why would CNBC see Android as a threat?

Windows 8 has the advantage of being more consistent across different devices, and gives a polished experience. This makes the product easier to market as the user can make assumptions about what they will get (unlike some crappy Android builds).

If you assume that most users don't care about the inner workings of the OS the real issue with WP8 is poor app quality.

IF they choose Windows, it's because they want compatibility with software they already use. That's what doomed RT. Microsoft thinks Metro/Modern/Market apps are what Windows is now. They want to shed the past. But customers buy Windows exactly because of continuity with the past.

Android customers want Google's ecosystem and the big selection of apps in the Play store. Microsoft's other problem is that the Bing/Live ecosystem isn't competitive.

I agree with the article to the extent that Microsoft should have done what Windows customers wanted: Let Windows be Windows. And they should have freed themselves to build the future, initially as a companion device to Windows. Or they could have bought Blackberry, or not shut down Nokia's OSs and gotten a leg up on that transition. QNX running and Android-ish userland based on an MSIL VM would have kicked ass. Instead we are dragging Windows everwhere and the userland is a hodgepodge of Web, C++, and MSIL apps.

Killing RT and running real Windows everywhere is a small improvement over the current mess, but Microsoft is wading deeper into the swamp instead of finding a way out. The only way to win at mobile is to make a non-Windows product. They are so far away from that as to be a lost cause, even if the next CEO sees the problem.

My understanding is that right now it costs most manufacturers either as much or more to use Android versus Windows, since nearly all of the big handset companies have patent licensing agreements with Microsoft on a per-handset basis.

So it's either pay Microsoft $15 for a Windows Phone license, or pay Microsoft $15 in patent licensing fees if you go with Android. It's less a cost issue so much as a market demand for Android (versus WP).