In a word, no. I tried HP’s all-in-one touchscreen HD machine briefly today and whilst it is a stunningly put together piece of hardware – almost of Apple-esque proportions – the Windows7 UI is absolutely hopelessly adapted to touch. There’s little Touch specific UI, no friendly icon driven interface like the iPhone has, and doing anything with touch alone (with the exception of zooming into and out of stuff) is hopelessly fiddly.
HP & others – Apple has been slower on this stuff, but when they come in (and now that they have the AppStore on OSX it’s only a matter of time), they will be good. Don’t believe Microsoft’s bullshit marketing (‘To the cloud’ my ass, you’d be lucky to hit the browser bar with a finger), Windows 7 can’t do this by itself. Do what HTC did, skin the OS to a point of usefulness, and THEN you might find you have a sleeper success story on the cards.
But I doubt it. There’s a lot to do…
More of my thoughts on the future of human/machine interaction soon.