It'll be their first attempt with any hope of success. I'm thinking Kinect on a tablet, among other things. I don't think people were ready for tablets during Microsoft's initial offerings. Touch interfaces just hadn't come far enough.
Did you see thedaily's take [1] on kinect for laptops? The reason you won't see kinect on a tablet anytime soon is this one observation:
"It murders batteries
Devices in the field must be plugged in whenever possible since the Kinect technology drains juice in a hurry..."
Laptops generally have much larger battery capacity (for example my current laptop has 94Wh while an iPad2 has 25Wh), and if Kinect kills laptop battery, forget about mobile for now.
I'm sure there's hurdles to overcome before it's a reality. Even if it's limited capacity, I think we're ready for gesture-based computing and I think Microsoft's closer to making that a reality than anyone else.
I disagree with your assessment. "ready for gesture-based computing" indicates more than just public acceptance (which is likely there) - it requires the hardware power and capacity, form factor, and killer-app software use cases.
This mindset of "build the OS, the apps will come" is no longer valid anymore, not when competitors like Google, Amazon and Apple are building out destinations and ecosystems, selling consumers on direct apps and tools rather than platforms that promise... especially, in Microsoft's case, when those promises have failed to pan out repeatedly in prior years.
I think it's going to be a tradeoff. For the price it might be worth the hiccups. It's hard to be sure, though. I love Android, I'm a complete fanboy, but as a pragmatist I acknowledge its flaws. This article is pretty spot on.
