On the rare occasions when my five-year-old son gets his hands on my Macbook, he frequently tries to interact with it by tapping and swiping the screen. Growing up with tablets around, this is natural to him. I know that's just one anecdote, but it's enough to make me think that the OP is right that regular, non-tablet computers will commonly have touch screens.
I think a lot of the people saying that Windows 8 is the most terrible mistake are forgetting precisely this. Dell has just released a series of laptop/tablet hybrids running win8, and also has Desktops with touchscreen.
I think Microsoft has done a great job by facilitating this transition(to "all computers with touchscreen") with win8. Now that a major Software has a touch-based paradigm, hardware vendors will have the courage to switch over as well.
Oh, I can't wait to see how the future will shape out!
Wow. This is mindblowing. I just went through the thought/body experiment:
On your desktop/laptop, assume you already have a touchscreen and everything works perfectly. Assume every swipe interaction you have ever used works perfectly.
Interact with the computer. Navigate around the computer. Drag and drop files. Surf around the internet. Click tabs and hyperlinks and whatever with the mouse, with touch, even with tab+space, whatever feels natural.
Do it. Seriously, literally do it. Go through the motions.
I see what you're getting at, and I agree that it feels quite clunky....now. But I wouldn't be so dismissive quite yet. What if in the future you could detach your screen and keep it on the table? Now, you have an actual "surface" (just like a tablet). You can play games with others on this surface . Maybe, divide the screens and then have everyone use part of their screen for their own work. (I'm just listing what I could think of doing with a really large tablet)
My point is simply that once we have touchscreens on every desktop, it might enable ways to interact with your computer that we might not even have thought of yet.
'Mindblowing' is nearly always a positive thing. I think your comment really made an impression. I did as he said, lounging here with my laptop, and it really was a nice feeling to have the option to reach up and scroll the page with my thumb. I'd like to put three fingers down and tap my left most finger to shuffle tabs but that's impossible now. I'm looking forward to future hardware.
Obviously you will be navigating a world designed with another paradigm in mind, the mouse, or the pointer.
This is what iOS did: Create a new world designed for being touched. Instead of the Windows CE or the Palms around the pointer.
You have to redesign the entire software stack for being touched, and it will happen.
Ubuntu Unity, Windows 8, and Mac OS new versions are races against time for being the first bringing professional creative tools "touch-ready".
It is very hard to do it, and current users are getting angry the same way people got mad when they removed the numeric keys from the macs(so command line software got redesigned around mouse).
Several years ago I bought a used Sharp Zaurus. I got so used to using the touch screen that, even now, I reach for a stylus when I try to use my TI-89.
I now have an Asus Transformer, and I find that I now reach for the screen on laptops as well. However, when I plug my mouse into my Transformer, it annoys my that I cannot use the mouse as I've comes to expect it to be used; instead, the OS interprets everything the mouse does as gestures.
I hope to someday install Linux on my tablet, and then try to create an interface that treats touch as touch, and mouse as mouse. I also have ideas for touch I'd like to experiment with.
