Thanks to Scott Hanselman’s excellent post a Guide to Installing and Booting Windows 8 Developer Preview off a VHD (Virtual Hard Disk), I now have a very useable touchscreen tablet.

Kudos to Microsoft for a very good job with the tablet usability–the side swiping gestures are intuitive and work well.  And the same keyboard in  desktop mode is great.

While I understand the strategic game plan of not supporting plug-ins in IE in tablet mode I think this is a tactical mistake.  Consumers want Flash (and Silverlight) support.  As a compromise, perhaps seamlessly run the desktop browser if a page is encountered that needs a plugin (it already switches to desktop mode when running downloaded files—e.g. from live.sysinternals.com).  If a consumer gets ones of these tablets, navigates to youtube (or the msn wonderwall), and is shown a message about upgrading the Adobe Flash Player, they are going to keep looking <IMHO>.