Your monthly subscription payments will come in the form of monthly Azure payments. People will accept that. This isn't 1996 anymore. People don't buy desktops, and laptops will soon be obsolete too. When your phone has a processor powerful enough to do all the work a consumer could ever want, there will be 3 main markets. Mobile, Server, and Gaming. Now they probably could keep charging for the OS for the gaming PC's, but servers and mobile are moving in directions other then Windows. Plus I think a lot of gamers were stealing windows anyways... so doesn't make sense to concentrate on that market.
I always get such a kick out of how silly this is. There is no reason people won't continue to have both mobile and desktop. When 'mobile' reaches the computer power of desktop, and screen size, and input, then it will be a desktop. They aren't mutually exclusive.
And it will be glorious. Though I doubt we'll see it in the next 10 years in the phone formfactor. Tablets might be there soon, the Surface Pro certainly is close already.
Piracy will come back with a vengeance. I don't know how they'll tell people who go buy their laptops that they have to pay a monthly subscription if they want to keep using it.
The upgrade from Windows 7 and 8.1 to Windows 10 will be free the first year. It won't be free in 2017!
It's still unclear if you get an upgrade license or a full license of Windows 10. The first one would mean, if you ever need to reinstall the PC/Notebook (harddisk/ssd crash), you would have to install Win7/8 and then upgrade to Win10 again (if the key allows that and is still valid in e.g. 2017).
ReactOS is an attempt that building an open source version of Windows XP/7. It uses source code from WINE and it aims for better compatibility with legacy apps by using a WinNT-like OS-Kernel: http://www.reactos.org
No, you are going to pay all the monthly subscriptions at once up front before you buy the laptop. It will work like this average laptop life span is say 42 months, and the monthly fee is $1.50. So the cost of a windows license is 42 * $1.50 = $66
which is baked into the price of the laptop. Microsoft will use more accurate numbers but the concept is unchanged.
Anyone can use Azure. They even have Linux distros available. Deploy what you want. Get charged micro transactions for CPU time. When your machine in the cloud is off, you only have a storage fee. Consumers won't really notice and Azure is priced to compete against other cloud providers.
I think Microsoft is really spot on here.