No, but that's probably because the mouse pointer is naturally very close to the thumbnail by the time it appears (because it had to hover over the button to trigger it). As a result you're typically making a shorter, slower movement and are thus more likely to accurately hit the correct target. By contrast the IE tabs or the W8 app list potentially require a much longer range movement and thus accurately targeting quickly becomes more difficult. You may have heard of this before, it's called Fitts Law.
You're also throwing out the notion (again) that desktop PCs will exist in this new world and if they do they won't have a mouse & keyboard. Devices like tablets and phones don't have the luxury of large screen sizes or mouse & keyboards so they need a simpler interface.
Am I? Or did I explicitly state:
What you're missing is that if you were designing an OS from scratch today with absolutely no legacy cruft whatsoever, even if you went with a "desktop" style paradigm with overlapping windows etc, you still wouldn't design it in a way that requires users to "open" or "close" applications.
What you're ignoring is that just because you take an app-centric view or move the application lifecycle to one that is more system managed - it doesn't mean you have to give up a desktop environment. Nobody is (or at least nobody should) say that all future applications will exist in a Metro-like environment.
If you look at the last 15-20 years of OS development you'll see this is exactly the way everyone has been trying to go. It's precisely why the Apple Dock was created originally in a way that barely distinguished between running and non-running apps and why Apple at the time were often trying to explain the "with OS X you won't need to close apps" line (admittedly they someone pre-empted their OS being truly ready to take that approach. It's what things like Restart Manager and the OS X equivalent were meant to enable. Even your much loved Window 7 Taskbar is about blurring the distinction between launching and switching apps, albeit within the confines of what traditional Win32 apps could do.
The only way in which Metro represents a shift in thinking is that Microsoft have learnt the hard way that they simply can't introduce bits and pieces into the OS and expect apps to embrace them in the same way that Apple can. The amount of software out there today that supports Restart Manager, for example, is statistically insignificant - because the sheer weight of developers wanting legacy OS support steers them all away from using new features (no matter how many times the idea that apps can "light up" by using new functions on a new OS, it's just a bit too rare in reality). In contrast all the big OS X apps are first party, so new OS functionality gets embraced fast, which in turn pushes third party developers to keep up. The end result is taking a much bigger, more holistic approach to bringing Windows up to date and dragging developers along with it and focusing that effort on the sector of the developer market (that which is predominantly consumer focused and thus carries less back-compat baggage).
Sounds like you're inferring that any app that isn't connectionless is written wrong. Another "you're holding it wrong" response. Very clever.
It's not "wrong", it's just dated. There are many good reasons that moving in favour of a RESTful approach is preferred these days, the fact that such designs work better in suspend/resume scenarios is by no means the biggest.
Current PC's having problems resuming from sleep? Say it isn't so! Oh yeah it is...
Oooh look, the goalposts move again. What do driver and hardware issues that cause resume to fail have to do with the speed by which a working PC can resume?
The Atom processor in the ThinkPad make me a little nervous since we all know who well netbooks perform but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt because it's next-gen and dual core. So what are you willing to give here Andy?
Clover Trail is the Intel SoC design. It may use x86 instructions, but otherwise it's a lot closer to the ARM chips you'll find in iPads and Android tablets. SoC, aside from supporting newer power modes like "connected standby" are far easier to handle from a driver PoV, because there is obviously a lot less variation in the support hardware than in a traditional PC.
I was there smart guy. That's how I got my tablet. Heard every word he said
Hearing != Listening.
Andy has an interesting sense of reality; one where the mouse and keyboard don't exist.
Au contraire, I fully expect mouse and keyboard to be used for a very long time.