
Re: Pulling up the drawbridge
MS actually runs quite well on ARM hardware.
I am writing this from a Snapdragon laptop — a Lenovo Yoga C630. I am running Linux, of course, but it is a very nice, modest ARM laptop. It was originally sold two years ago, and I bought it a couple of months ago. Speedwise, it's completely OK, comparable in most tasks with my same-generation i5 laptop, but is fanless — and the battery lasts like forever.
Of course, the machine was sold running Windows, and it runs quite happily. It does have some sort of x86 emulation for programs not available for ARM; I never tested the emulation's quality.
But anyway, I don't think MS will let this one go as they did with the Windows Phone.