I believe they stated that they are targeting netbooks, so I think that long-term what we'll see is a focus on more and more cloud applications (google docs, calendar, etc). That will both reduce the requirements for applications to be run on the device and be able to make the devices even more 'lite' and inexpensive.

An OS that have that as a focus, maybe with on-screen widgets for updates, etc, could be very interesting.

I don't think the intent for this OS is to compete toe-to-toe with Windows and OSx as a desktop/laptop OS where you actually need to do some local processing.