[Windows Phone 7 General] N8ter:
There is little if any innovation in WP7. People Hub as already done in TouchWiz. All of the Social integration is pretty much same ole same ole. Apple already had GameCenter. Apple has iPod (i.e. Zune) and you could get All-You-Can-Eat music from services like Rhapsody on other platforms.

Office isn't innovative because ThinkFree and other apps have comparable functionality and integration in other platforms. Also, Office has been in Windows Mobile since 2002 or so... The functionality of Outlook/Office going from WM to WP7 has actually been downgraded quite a lot. For example, WP7 doesn't support Exchange Tasks and the calendar is, IMO, worse...

Nothing great about Push Notifications which are worse and more volatile than any other platform that offers them.

Tiles and Live Tiles are just Widgets with a different look and feel.

Microsoft didn't really innovate any much moving from WM to WP7, and the base OS is still Windows CE. They used Silverlight as a way to decouple the UX from the base OS, but they released it before it was finished (hence why there are 1.5k APIs keeping apps off the platform coming with Mango).

How well WP7 does depends solely on how Android and iOS develop going into the future.

Nokia will help MS but Google has way more manufacturers and Apple will continue to do well building their own handset. Also, with Nokia somewhat abandoning Symbian a lot of their users will jump to Android because WP7 does not have functionality on par with BB/WM/Symbian to allow them to migrade decently form Symbian to WP7. Nokia cannot do that without reworking a bit of the OS and I doubt Microsoft will want them to diverge so far from the reference implementation.

I think in 2010 they lost bigtime because they didn't live up to the hype. The carriers still have as much control over WP7 as they do with Android, and their update system is still only on par with Android and much worse than iOS. In addition, the launch hardware is rather poor and with the i5 coming out soon after Mango, and Android Manufacturers pushing the button (not to mention Google making some pretty good changes in their OS latesly - free Voice/Video Chat in Google Talk?! We don't even have a WLM and it's not slated to even come with Mango!) it will be hard for them to persuade switches. In addition to that, the pitiful state of RTM WP7 has already made them a laughing stock on many tech blogs and among users. They should have waited, IMO.

People who have Android phones won't tell their friends to get WP7 devices because of Google Talk/Services. People with iOS devices will likely push that. People with Blackberries will recommend Blackberries because of BBM, etc. People with WP7 devices are generally on the fence and many are lamenting the purchase. The OS is so functionally thin, and even will still be compared to iOS/Android with Mango, that it's really hard to enjoy it. Android Manufacturers are already getting better with Updates (Samsung leading the pack, suprisingly), so that is already no longer a reason to go with WP7...

A good smartphone will not make you feel like you are hampered because you upgraded from a different OS, and a good smartphone will not force you to double fist two smartphones because it's lacking in so much functionality as to be unusable without a different device to fill in the gaps.

WM had usability issues, but it was a complete smartphone OS.

And BTW, it had nothing to do with it having a decade of development. Even from day one it was never possible to call WM functionally thin compared to anything on the market (Symbian, Blackberry, Palm, etc.). The actual phones/devices running it was a different story.

And as a business user WP7 is practically useless. It isn't even worth consideration. I'd get a Blackberry or Symbian Anna device, instead...