Again, noting that I haven't tried W8 in depth yet.

Re: iOS vs W8 on tablets - here are the features I am interested in:
1) Multi-tasking: there are a lot of times on my iPad when I am say, watching a movie in Safari, and would like to chat to someone at the same time, but I can't, unless I change app, which would kill the running video. W8 promises to solve this.

2) App switching - on iOS you switch apps with a clunky four finger swipe, which means you have to stop holding the tablet with one hand and move your fingers and swipe across the screen. W8 uses a swipe in from the edge with your thumb, which is a very easy and natural gesture to use with the way you naturally hold a tablet.

3) Charms bar - iOS has two ways to access core functions or return to the home screen - the home button and a four finger swipe up. The four finger swipe up has the same problems as the app switching gesture. The home button is slow to press (one thing I love about my Lumia is how fast it is to tap the soft touch home button - the big clicky home button may be iconic but in my opinion it is slow and inefficient.) Anyway the idea of a quick

4) Microsoft's autocorrection and keyboard layouts: another thing I love about my Lumia is the word suggestion bar. Compared to iOS's autocorrection features it is incredibly superior. On iOS you get single pop-up suggestions above where your words are actually being typed, which you can only cancel by clicking on the target itself (so every time you need to cancel it you have to tap a different place = inefficient.) Furthermore, the suggestions are often wrong, no alternatives are offered, and there is no easy way to revert them. On WP7, if you tap on a word, it selects it instantly, and displays all the autocorrect options, and the original word if it changed it. On iOS, you have to tap a word, then wait... then tap again... then the stupid pop-over text control thing appears, then you have to tap "Suggest" (which sometimes doesn't appear!), then another little delay, then you have to find your original word... blech. Not sure how similar W8's tablet text input is to WP7, or whether the autocorrect bar and text selection features carry over, but if there's even half of these features, it'll be an incredible improvement from iOS. I can't overstate how much text entry sucks on an iPad. One more thing: W8 has multiple different thumb keyboard size options. iOS only has one. It's way too big for my thumbs on the wide iPad bezel. AND W8 has a skewed layout thumb keyboard, which maybe doesn't look as pristine as the iPad's version, but seems to me like it would work better with actual human thumbs.

5) People hub and sharing - one thing I do a lot of is sharing - especially links to friends. iOS sucks for this. There's a stupid share button in the Safari browser that lets you email a link or post it to your Facebook wall (with no option to post to friends' walls!) but in no way is sharing built in to the core of the system. On my Lumia, again, I love how it integrates with my entire Facebook friends list, and it makes sharing very easy. The Share charm integrated with the People hub on W8 sounds like, if it works as it should, an absolute killer feature to me, making it ridiculously easy to share anything from across the entire OS. I like how Microsoft seems to be really trying to integrate this sort of stuff into the core of the OS.

6) Livetiles - again another feature that is great on my phone. There's a lot more you can do with a homescreen than just rows of dead icons.

Windows 8 isn't just a bit experimental - it's a groping attempt to stitch wings onto a monkey or a beak onto a cow.

Well, that's your opinion.

this isn't a technical solution - it's marketing strategy.

First: yes, it is a technical solution. The scenario is like this: used to be that computers were big things that sat on desks. Used to be you kept all your files on one PC and moving them from PC to PC was difficult. Used to be that not everybody used computers. Used to be that the internet was a niche part of computer use. Used to be that no one had persistent online social networks integrated into their lives. Used to be that tablets weren't prevalent. Etc etc. Then all of these things changed - and now the world's most popular OS is changing in response to these changes. These are all technical problems (or whatever you want to call them) and W8 is an attempt to begin solving these problems.

Second: at the end of the day, the best marketing move Microsoft can make is to build great products that take advantage of all the possibilities of modern technology. I still argue that, after a period of relative stagnation, computer interfaces are starting to respond to the massive changes in computing technology and culture. Windows 8, whether it is particularly well-executed or not, whether it fits well with the legacy desktop or not, whether it breaks some parts of the desktop work environment PC model or not, is a step in that direction - the right direction.