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Windows has been running on ARM for ages. Windows RT was an early go, but even before that internal builds of Windows for ARM were kept around.

Windows Phone 8 ran on the Windows 8 kernel, and Windows 10 Mobile ran on the Win10 kernel.

It seems like the hard part here was doing the seamless emulation of x86 apps. Writing a production quality general purpose emulator is hard.

It's not like Microsoft doesn't have examples to draw on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32

Who says that it was just finished recently? There are a large number of things that go into projects like this, Windows could have been ported years ago, but they were not ready.

No kidding. This was announced in 2011, right?

NT was available on Intel, Alpha, PowerPC, and MIPS chips. I'm surprised it was that hard to add ARM. Or is this something different?

What do you think the Surface was running? After it got jailbroken people even compiled lots of different Win32 applications and ran it on it.

That wasn't the same thing though, was it? This isn't Windows RT v2, is it?