The original vision of "information at your fingertip" was behind the Cairo project. And Cairo had an object stored in the NTFS filesystem driver. WinNT4 and 2000 got several of the Cairo inovations. Well, some hidden APIs were still left in (at least in WinXP era).
Unfprtunately I think it took MS too long to get here. Other vendors got to the home appliances part before them, which is mind boggling given the traction MS had once upon a time.
The original implementation was based on COM, the idea to implement CLR instead came afterwards.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/07/05/more-c-net...
So, WinRT is nothing more than COM+ Runtime brought back to life, with some of the lessons learned in all those CLR years.
WinFS was real. Before the project was cancelled, we released a beta and a "beta refresh" - both installable on XP.
(Disclaimer: I was on the WinFS team.)
Video (watch at 14:55): https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/scobleizer/Shishir-Mehrotra-...
I tested WinFS beta2 on a high end WinXP PC (back then), WinFS beta was slow and the cool "Live Journal" demo app wasn't included.
At least I read it as »We took the API and a bunch of support infrastructure for that API and simply changed the storage engine on disk completely underneath that.«