It would be my personal nightmare if desktop OS' adapt this practice, although I fear at least Windows will do so in incremental steps. I think this will be the end of its dominance on desktops, but I have no doubts management at MS will try. So this would be a good and a bad thing.

And do you honestly believe a sandbox would have stopped MS changing the page?

That iOS isn't perfect is an understatement in my opinion. It has a nice UI, it usually works and my pads lie in my cabinet since I cannot do anything remotely interesting and productive with it.

I got my iOS devices for free and it still somehow feels like I got cheated on. Like these devices belong to Apple, not to me.