So where are these technologies? And why isn't Microsoft hauling huge sacks of money home each year from multiple products that didn't exist in the 90's? As far as I can tell, they make money from vendor lock-in with Office and Windows, and a gaming division founded by a visionary who left because he couldn't stand working there anymore.
I don't know if I agree that they are ahead of Google and Apple, but they have come up with a few cool things.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2420579
They bought Kinect from another company – the hard work of getting approvals and resources and everything else to start on it had already been done outside of Microsoft.
It's definitely an impressive bit of tech, but would it have been possible were its genesis subject to the byzantine internal politics of Microsoft? I dunno. I wouldn't put money on it.
As to WP7, it's actually more of an indictment of Microsoft than it is a credit to them. Consider how much of a clusterfuck their mobile strategy has been for the last four years. It took them forever to get their bureaucratic shit together and actually ship something that resembled a next generation smartphone, and once they did, they did a piss-poor job supporting and improving the platform, despite the very high standard set by both Google and Apple for the same. It's a perfect example of their inability to execute or respond to changes in their industry.
Not all of the their developer stuff is great (I actually had a MSFT PM to apologize to me for the unit-testing stuff built into Visual Studio) but I can't imagine life without Linq.
When you've got other companies bringing home billions in revenue on product categories that did not even exist five years ago, it's tough to be impressed that Microsoft gave a facelift to a product that was new in the early 90's.
It's perfectly possible for a company to be successful and innovative without having huge successes in product categories that didn't exist until recently.
From a perfectly selfish perspective, if Microsoft totally gave up on tablets, phones, search, and social. I wouldn't care or even notice because Apple, Google, and Facebook are meeting my needs nicely. Maybe it's unrealistic to expect them to just keep making the things that I use every day better and better. I don't know.