This is what I've heard. But I do know that battery life is shown on the desktop. Changing networks is done on the desktop. A lot of settings are changed from the desktop. Will these options disappear? Will there be Metro dialogs for them? The Windows 8 I have installed on my PC right now could never function in Metro-only. How is Windows RT different? I'm not getting that answer from any tech blog, and that's the problem.

WinRT is technically a wrapper around Win32 that makes it easy for other languages (C#, javascript, etc) to gain access to a low level windows API.

Pretty confusing really, since it stands for "Windows Runtime", and with all the baggage the surrounds the "Runtime" term, you'd think it was a full blown runtime environment and competitor to their own CLR (it's not).

In addition to that, they're also using WinRT as a marketing term to segment their Surface product line (dividing it into a "Metro Only" configuration, or WinRT, and the version that can run regular windows apps). Very strange overall strategy on multiple levels. I'm a lifelong Microsoft developer and am having trouble wrapping my mind around it: I can only imagine the general public's reaction.