Hmm, Elop green-lighting a MeeGo skunkworks team disconnected from Nokia?
This looks interesting. Also, someone said earlier in the thread that red and black -> opposite of Nokia colors.

Also, since Microsoft will definitely disallow making a swipe UI for WP7 this looks like a sensible decision, instead of simply canning Nokia's R&D.

Should the N9 be a hit, and Nokia's WP7 spectacularly fail, they'll likely ride the wave and start making successors to the N9.

Finally, they'll hopefully not pull a Nokia and close-source everything that stops up from porting the UI to other devices, or simply fixing what's broken on ours.