Stuart Turton, bring that maniacally-follicled, weirdly shaped head over here so I can slap you round the back of it for praising Windows 8.

I’ve just watched Microsoft’s Windows 8 reveal and it’s clear that Messrs Sinofsky, Ballmer et al have not so much jumped the shark as chucked the whole company into the aquarium.

Let’s start with the quite bad news before moving onto the really dismaying stuff. From this (admittedly early) video, the heart of Windows 8 looks much like Windows 7. Once Jensen gets over the exciting slidey touchscreen features of Windows 8, the same Start menu and Windows furniture is lurking beneath. Skip to three minutes through the video – that’s Windows 7, and it looks exactly the same as the operating system I’d be running right now if I didn’t like OS X more.

This consistency is broadly good news for PCs. Windows 7 is a great operating system and doesn’t need too much tinkering. The bad news is that with a full-blown desktop operating system at its heart, Windows 8 is still going to need decent hardware.

Windows 8 can be a desktop and laptop operating system, or it can be an operating system for tablets – it cannot be both

It’s an assumption to say that Windows 8 on a tablet will be a chuntery, grinding experience, but I’m going to say it anyway. A full-blown desktop operating system like Windows requires too much power to run properly on an ultraportable, low-power processor, which is why Apple only brought the barest bones of OS X to the iOS platform, and why any tablet PC running a full version of Windows 7 is absolutely doomed.

I remember watching Ballmer announce a sensationally boring set of tablets at CES in January and thumping my head against the desk, along with everyone else who’d ever tried to use a Windows 7 tablet. Windows 8 can be a desktop and laptop operating system, or it can be an operating system for tablets. It cannot be both.

Stuart’s right about Microsoft and touch when he says Microsoft hasn’t cracked it, but he’s wrong about why the company has struggled. Microsoft’s problem isn’t that it cannot design a touch UI; it’s done a great job with Windows Phone 7. The company’s problem has been trying to shoehorn touchscreen devices into markets that don’t need or want them.

Like a showhorse with a handgun, a touch interface on a desktop makes no sense. Once you’re sitting in front of a computer with a keyboard and mouse, the screen’s either too far away or at too oblique an angle to be reasonably used as a touchscreen, and why Microsoft thinks everyone wants to get fingerprints all over their desktop screens is so beyond me it’s in danger of colliding with the International Space Station.

A desktop operating system that integrates a huge swathe of touchscreen features is a waste of time, and before you argue with that, how many times have you used Windows 7’s touch features, or even been tempted to buy the hardware to use them?

Let’s head for Stuart’s main contention, though, which is that Apple is too big a threat for Windows 8 to be awful. I don’t disagree that Microsoft can ill-afford to have a Vista-style misfire with Windows 8. But Windows 8 already looks awful, and the person who decided that a loud, purple/orange/vomit colour scheme would make a good first impression needs to visit the opticians.

Second, remember Vista? When it came out, Microsoft was feeling the squeeze from a resurgent Apple, XP was well and truly on its last legs, and Microsoft badly needed to pull something great out of the bag. The result? An operating system that cost the better part of $6 billion to develop, gave a sensational first impression, and then spent the next five years annoying users until they gazed wistfully at their XP disks and reinstalled that. The idea that Microsoft will respond well to the threat of Apple is unproven at best; the only exception I can think of where the company has truly risen to a challenge set to it is Windows Phone 7, and that arrived no fewer than three years after Apple set the bar. As for its decision to spend $8.5 billion on Skype? All I can say is that the money could have been better spent on splitting Windows into two streams, one for traditional computing and one for touchscreen devices.

At the end of Microsoft’s teaser video, Harris says: “This is the new version of Windows. It’s going to run on laptops, it’s going to run on desktops, it’s going to run on PCs with mouse and keyboard, it’s going to run on touch slates: it’s going to run on everything.” All well and good, but the danger – if not the flat-out likelihood – is that if Microsoft designs Windows 8 to run on everything, it may not run well on anything.

Here’s something that’s crept up on us at PC Pro towers: Windows 7 has overtaken Windows XP as the operating system most used by visitors to our website (click graph to enlarge).

The graph above runs from January 2008 until the end of last month – Windows 7 actually surpassed XP for the first time in December, we just hadn’t noticed it before (we’ve been busy, OK?).

The growth of Windows 7 has been quite extraordinary. In a little over 18 months, it’s gone from nowhere to the most used operating system. Compare that to Windows Vista, which didn’t even come close to toppling Windows XP, never getting any higher than 27% of the PC Pro audience.

It’s also worth noting the gradual incline of Mac OS X, which was used by 4.8% of our visitors at the beginning of 2008, and has since more than doubled that to 12.3% last month.

And what of Linux OSes? Our stats software only allows us to plot four trend lines at a time, hence the omission of Linux from the graph. Yet, it’s surpassed our Apple-flavoured friend in terms of growth, accounting for a mere 2.4% of visitors in January 2008, and 6.7% in February 2011.

That’s nigh on a fifth of the PC Pro readership using a non-Windows OS. Times really are changing.

Update at 5pm:

A couple of the commenters below asked for the figures on iOS and Android. It appears our regular stats software doesn’t discriminate between Mac OS X on the desktop and iPhone/iPad/iPods. Likewise, the Linux figure was indeed bolstered by Android users.

Google analytics provides a much more detailed breakdown of operating systems, although there’s a slight variation in the figures because of differences in the way the two analytics packages count users.

Here’s the top ten for visitors to PC Pro for February 2011, as provided by Google Analytics:

1. Windows 83.08%

2. Macintosh 7.31%

3. Linux 3.09%

4. iPhone 2.96%

5. Android 1.68%

6. iPad 0.91%

7. Unrecorded 0.51%

8. iPod 0.22%

9. BlackBerry 0.09%

10. Symbian 0.04%

Now before everyone rushes off to bag this bargain, I should point out that you can also buy Home Premium for £166.37! Obviously excluding VAT again, Microsoft has to make a living you know.

A quick trawl online reveals the going rate for the full version of Vista Home Premium is around £130 inc VAT – and you can buy it for less than £90 inc VAT if you’re willing to opt for the more restricted OEM version, which is tied to the motherboard you first install it on (so if you build a new PC, you’ll have to buy a new copy of Windows).

So, taking away VAT, Microsoft is charging a premium of over £50 if you buy direct from its store. It would be amazing to discover just how many sales it’s made for these two excellent picks, but sadly I don’t think I’m going to get much joy out of Microsoft on that one. My guess? A princely zero.