I thought it was called Midori...? And the main idea was to increase the usage of cloud computing and thin clients... not to make the os unusable in a noisy room?
First, it's an option, not a mandatory thing. I've started using my computer as my TV/Home Theatre. Think about how easy it'll be to be in bed, talk into a cordless microphone and say "TV on", "Play Movie <title>", or "Record Show, then power off." All while never getting up. Then just think about if you had a very sensitive microphone hooked up to it and you control your light housing off it. "Computer, Lights On." Star Trek anyone? The thing about it coming with the OS is that it's got to a point where the voice recognition (VR) software is becoming more perfected, and needs less manual tuning.
I've heard from a MS trainer that Microsoft plans to one day drop their Windows platform and focus on cloud-like computing. Where you do away with the kernel and focus on services. I don't know if Win7 will be the release for that, I think it might the OS that follows Win7, but I do know that Win7 may introduce hypervisors - emulator-like programs, such as VMWare or the ability to run and OS like Linux over top of Windows. Also, there was talks of including Virtual HardDrive support - something I use, especially for mounting/dismounting those iso images.
Microsoft is now workin on Windows 7 and cancelled Vista sp2 becoz it sucked..and I pretty much sure that this will be a boom in the IT no matter whether you'll use keyboard & mouse or just audio msgs .
You should read up on this a little more. Windows 7 was always planned to be the successor of WinXP. It was planned for release I think in 2005, but the Blaster Worm and other like worms/virus in 2003 caused Microsoft to focus on patching XP, which became the more stable service pack 2 (SP2). This postponed Win7, but MS decided to release another OS (Vista). Vista is basically WinXP with some of the planned enhancements that Win7 was going to introduce, which is part of the reason why people don't advise getting Vista if you already have XP.
To make a long story short, Win7 is going to be the official upgrade to WinXP and should fix some of Vistas shortcomings (like security popups, etc).
In my opinion, it's come to the time where there is not much more you can do with the OS that really makes it worth spending a mini-fortune on a new one. The growth curve is approaching it's peak. I've seen several 3rd party OSs that use a 3D desktop, which is pretty interesting -- maybe that is the way of the future.
I'm hearing that Windows 7 might be coming as soon as June 2009 to OEM installs.
There's been mixed announcements on Win7's release date. Obviously, you can plan for it, but you can't always budget time for mistakes, and then again you might finish faster than intended. The original date was for early 2010, but they also announced June 3rd 2009 as a release date.