Tabletifcation

This week I got to ‘play’ with OSX 10.7 Lion on a a 27 inch iMac and this got me thinking about the tabletifcation of operating systems.
So what do I mean when I say tabletifcation?
Well, it is clear from the design choices made in Lion that it is made for use with at least a track pad in mind, in fact I would guess it’s ultimate design aim is for a touch screen to be the pointer input device. This is fine on a laptop, it fit’s well with the smaller screen and fact that it has a track pad, however, the design choices don’t seem to make so much sense on a large screen when using a mouse.
In fact on this iMac, it felt downright awkward. Now it’s true I wasn’t using a multi touch mouse (we do use them at work to avoid the maintenance cost and problems of replacing batteries!) but surely the OS should work just as well regardless of the mouse used?
It’s looking like the situation is going to be similar on the PC when we get Windows 8. I’ve played briefly with the developer preview version of 8, which is a very early version admittedly and that again works okay (I wouldn’t say well) with a track pad but not quite so well with a mouse. The difference in ease of use was less with Windows 8, I would say, but it wasn’t as smooth with track pad to start with, it is how still pre-beta.
I think this tabletifcation trend is worrying for desktop PC’s. There are very good reasons for these design choices when used on a tablet form factor, but the desktop PC is very different. It is that difference that caused these design choices to be made, so why then try to ‘retrofit’ these choices on the desktop PC?
Also lets not for get that a laptop is not a tablet either, the differences are a lot smaller than those between a desktop and a laptop, but there are differences. The most obvious to me is that I can’t see a touch screen working very well for a laptop, it’s awkward and uncomfortable to hold your hand in position in front of a laptop screen to long.
I know a lot of people think that the desktop PC is going away, and while it is true that there are fewer and fewer cases where a desktop PC is needed now, we still have them and will for a long time. I don’t think we will ever get to a point where desktop machines are not needed, they will reach a point where they are only used in a few edge cases, but they will always be there.
We are some way away from that time, I think, so we still need OS’s that feel comfortable on a desktop form factor and to me it feels like we are starting to lose that now.