XP, Vista and 7 were designed to use an active stylus with pressure sensitivity, to help with handwriting recognition. That makes for a very expensive screen and it's useless without the stylus. 8 and later were designed for finger operation.
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Back in 2012 I worked with a UK retailer who wanted to put tablets in their stores, to allow staff to help customers place orders through their website. I think the use case was if the customer hadn't found what they wanted in the store.
They'd done a successful trial with iPads, but for a wider deployment Corporate wanted something they could lock down: concerns about PCI DSS rules, because they'd be using the same Wi-Fi/LAN the tills used. So they picked Windows 7-based rugged tablets in order to use Group Policy to lock it down.
Trouble was, no-one had checked that the e-commerce website actually worked on a Windows 7 tablet! The "mobile" version of the site was "optimised" for Safari (read: didn't work on anything else) - IE didn't do the infamous click delay.
Meanwhile, the "desktop" version relied on hover menus, which you couldn't do with touch, only with the active stylus. That does mouse-over when the stylus is close to, but not touching, the screen. And the UI was all sized for mouse usage, hard to hit with the stylus, even at higher zoom.
The extra trouble with using the desktop site was the use of a lot of Flash elements. Not essential to the search/purchase flow, but they didn't want customers to see any image placeholders or other broken content.
Also, the store network was heavily firewalled. So we had to figure out a whitelist.
After a month or so of trying to square this circle, we all realised that it wasn't really in anyone's skill set and just costing too much. My role was mobile app development for Windows CE: our company got the contract because they used our software in store, and I'd dabbled in our Group Policy.
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Also, the store network was heavily firewalled. So we had to figure out a whitelist.
Though my use cases revolved around having an active stylus anyway: handwriting and drawing.
From my perspective the only major fault with the XP/Vista/7 tablet UI was a lack of easy shortcut to switch pen tricks on and off for graphics apps.