It sounds like the goal is compatibility across MS's platforms
I talked with the editor of an industry magazine, who's been writing about the computer industry since the late 1970s, about W8. He said 1) that MS was pretty much forced into the consumer devices market by Apple's success there, and 2) W8 Metro on the desktop/laptop is an effort to provide software compatibility between Microsoft's platforms. The idea being that you can write your app. once for all devices, and you can run the app. on the desktop/laptop as well. I've heard others describe this, but more in the sense that desk/laptops will be able to run apps. written for phones and tablets, not so much the other way around. The kind of software you can run on the traditional Windows platform is not so easily brought into the phone/tablet world. It is a statement, though, that MS believes devices are going to be their growth market in the future, and they're just bringing desk/laptops along.
I asked him about what this does to business IT that's using Windows now. It seemed to me MS was abandoning that market. He disagreed, saying that the consistency between platforms would be seen as a boon to business IT, though he conceded that on phones and tablets there's a "feature max" you can run into quickly with business apps., and that not all applications will be able to transition to devices, because the method of interaction on the device is too limited.
