WP& is playing catch up so clearly it has not leapfrogged the competition -- even accounting for Mango. But I think usability and UX will be the differentiator for WP7 when it does gain feature parity.
My prediciton is that by end of the year, WP7 will compete on an equal footing with Android and iOS in terms of feature parity. It might still have an order of magnitude less number of apps, but I suspect that with the opening up of this richer API, the app situation will be much improved as well. This will set up Nokia's entry to the market in 2012. Combining WP7 with good hardware and services like turn-by-turn navigation and a huge retail channel is a recipe for great sales. I am now beginning to believe that Nokia has made a very smart bet.
Android is already saturated with almost all hardware vendors jumping in and entry of low cost Chinese handsets. Microsoft may own it, but remember that they are an upstart now in the mobile business, not an established player. I am pretty sure this deal would allow them a lot more leverage to influence the OS design and software. Pretty much like the early WinTel era.
Xbox has been the highest selling console for six straight months now. Expect that to continue given how wildly popular Kinect has been over the holiday season.
Taking liberty to concoct a scenario. If Walmart asked shoppers to take a photograph of the product layout on display at their favorite shop (which say happens to be Target because its the most popular in town) and used that to make small modifications to its own layout, would you say Walmart needs to credit Target, or that its copying Target? This is an arrangement between Walmart and its shoppers and there is nothing Target can do about it other than making a brouhaha. I don't see why things have to be different in the digital world. We all know how user interfaces historically have been blatantly ripped off.
Let's say tomorrow DDG is the search engine with the largest market share. Then Bing would be getting all the clickstream data from DDG. I hope you do realize that this "algorithm" is not Google specific. Its just a novel ranking technique that incorporates a human user feedback loop and is a pretty well known technique in the information retrieval field.
I don't understand why everyone is using the term "copying the results". I think what Bing did was very smart, they incorporated user clickstream data. One could accuse this method of walking a thin line morally, but I suspect that Google's accusation wouldn't have stood any water as a lawsuit.
I agree with the OP that there is a lot of marketing bullcrap that gets around in the form of "whitepapers". But WNT has a sizeable server market share and is growing pretty well, so the OS itself is not trash (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...).