(in response to Craig_Matthews)
The funny thing is - Apple agrees with you.
Apple was criticized (admittedly, by yours truly included) for the meager updates in Lion, basically "iOS'ing" the OS. But that's really not what they did with respect to how you interact with the OS. I'm hearing frequently from my Mac friends that the additions to Lion benefit power users as well - yes, Apple added the Launchpad and mission control - but they didn't remove anything. Lion is more adept for power users as well as newcomers from iOS. They dismissed the small list of changes, but the changes that were made benefit their worfklow.
If you're coming from iOS, there's the Launchpad, the Apple store, the multitude of finger swipes that you can do on a trackpad that mimic touch-screen gestures. With just a little training an iOS user who never touched OSX would feel relatively comfortable.
If you're a power user, you still have Spotlight, Quick Look, and now Mission Control. You have more control and speedy shortcuts as compared to before, but there's also a bridge for the users who want a more direct and simplistic approach and really want to stay in Apple's walled garden.
But here's the kicker - it's all tied together in presentation. Same font rendering as iPad/iPhone, same graphical style in terms of widgets and scrollbars, similar animation. You look at an iPhone/iPad/OSX - the GUI says "I came from Apple". Hell, most of the icons of popular apps are exactly the same even. You don't choose to launch apps via Launchpad and suddenly presented with a day-glo background and completely different GUI to what you've ever used before. Want to use a more touchscreen or magicpad-oriented app from within OSX? That's what fullscreen mode is for. Your app is tailored to mouse/keyboard, but when you hook into the fullscreen API, you're presenting a subset of features to the end user.
Now of course, Apple has multiple advantages here. The iPhone and iPad are obviously massive hits, so the inclusion of aspects of their interface into MacOS will not shock anyone, nor is the transition to them exceptionally jarring while you're in OSX. Their API's are spanking new babies compared to W32, so there's more freedom for synergy in GUI aesthetics and how they operate. Trying to do a full-on Metro in WDDM may be far more challenging than I believe (regardless I'm not advocating for that).
But the fear that "If you make Win8's desktop mode too modern or too Metro-inspired, people won't use Metro" is ridiculous. So since OSX's desktop and iOS now look so similar in style, does that mean iOS development will stop? Of course not, as there are distinct categories of user experience that depends on the form factor. No programmer is going to write an app with a huge array of features on iOS, as even if there were enough computing resources behind it, the limiting factor is the finger. Conversely, I seriously doubt the next iWork release will have less features - it will have more.
MS is acting as if Metro is already a huge hit and people just need it in their everyday workflow, to where it jumps in your face and screams its presence. If the company often derided for their herding-users-into-our-vision mentality doesn't believe this is the right approach, WTF does Microsoft?
