I'm kind of scratching my head here, can someone explain what problem this solves? There's already a CLR and already a way to build native apps for Win 8, etc. This is a new CLR that can run new 'native' apps?
I suspect that there's things that require this which they haven't announced yet, since on its own it seems like something kinda nice but not beneficial enough to justify creating.
Are you sure? You still need the standard libraries, a garbage collector, its security checks when loading other code, and may want to use its compiler from your code. Together, that's a lot, maybe all, of what's in the framework.
The biggest difference with NGen is the fact that .NET Native doesn't ever "fall back" to JIT compiled code. There are other differences--refactored runtime, static-optimized libraries, static marshalling, etc.--which can be seen by the perf wins over NGen. We're seeing 40% startup performance gain over NGen apps for top Windows Store apps.