I am not yet a Win 8 user, but I had a personal one-on-one introduction to it on the 'surface' at a Microsoft demo kiosk at Logan airport about 3 weeks ago.

That particular setup of Win 8 is aimed at the 'gotta be online' on tons of different sites simultaneously, that is demonstrated by some users these days.

My iPhone does this in a relatively graceful way, without a whole bunch of little screens all simultaneously waving their hands for my attention.

There is a more Win7 mode of Win8, which is probably what I will end up using if I ever buy another PC, which looks less and less like the future state for me.

One thing is clear, there are almost no music 'apps' in the Win8 app store. There are all kinds of books on the Win8 store on how to use music apps on other OS (which was very comical to me) but no real apps like the plethora of what's available for iOS.

iOS built in core audio and midi functions (they even call it that) into the OS itself. Low level code. No ASIO needed to be developed by a 3rd party - its in the iOS itself.

Kind of like what some of the Silicon Graphics computers had back in the 90's. They had instructions which took A/D directly to the CPU and directly from the CPU to D/A, without having it having to be buffered in/out of blocks of memory. They were THE choice for audio/video processing because of it for many years. The whole Indigo series.

As to interface design, the main question I would put out there would be:

Does a particular feature really need it's own 'window' to be manually opened and closed? Is there a way for the interface to be context sensitive and eliminate the operation of manual open/close? That's what is brilliant with a few products on the market; and not talking about Apple stuff here. Garageband on iPHone - elegant; less so on Mac OSX. One bad part about the iOS Garageband: you have to shake the device to delete the most recent take. Yes, shake - like an etch-a-sketch!

Think of any 'junk' manipulation process by the user and eliminate them. Unnecessary clicks, scrolls, menu picks, etc. etc.

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