The "stores" make it dead simple for users to buy and load apps and feel less concerned about malware and other parasitic behaviors on the part of developers desperate to monetize customers.
.NET and Visual Studio are old; Microsoft is always introducing and murdering developer technologies. It's become an unreliable partner particularly in the mobile place. Now we see this pathetic article talking about convergence when that was Microsoft's argument for the better part of two decades and yet despite their focuses on one-size fits all PC & Tablet solutions they failed to catch on in the marketplace.
Apple did it by realizing the tablet space would be best served by different usability approaches. That's history. That's what happened in the marketplace. Microsoft finds itself behind the 8-ball.
Metro (Modern) versions of Office and integration into the Win 8 desktop is haphazard at best. It's a poor fit, a shoddy usability experience. This is the kind of thing users have become tired of seeing from Microsoft and why they've started looking elsewhere for something better.
Win 8 on ARM & x86 is as meaningless as Windows NT on Alpha, PowerPC and elsewhere back in the mid-90s. iOS and OS X share a common core, cross pollination is simple and Apple has vast experience in moving or supporting multiple architectures as once.
“The CodeToad doesn’t know its history. Visual BASIC came in 1991. Turbo Pascal was in 1983. “
I never said they weren’t. Apparently you have a problem with reading comprehension.