That pretty much sums it up. The 8.1 changes, so far as I can tell, are bugfix/stability changes.

The article feels like click-bait to me. The little blurb on zdnet about the author helped me better understand where he's coming from: Matt Baxter-Reynolds is a mobile software development consultant and technology sociologist based in the UK. His next book, "Death of the PC" is out in September.

Do you think part of this phenomenon may be that all the investments in automated testing have shortened the time window between RC and RTM such that there's much less to be gained by an early RTM release? (and of course less time in everyone's schedule to coordinate it)