They won't. Because Apple is NOT going to make 2 tablets that visually look virtually identical but provide different functionality. Microsoft botched the Surface launch by producing 2 nearly identical tablets, giving them nearly identical names, calling both operating systems "Windows", with one of those tablets not being able to run 98% of available Windows software packages.
It is common to claim that media bias is the cause, but any objective observer can see that what Microsoft did was confusing. Just like showing every Surface device in every video and print ad attached to a Type Cover and NOT including it in the price of a Surface.
MS did totally drop the ball in 2012 per marketing, but I expect pundits to figure it out too, because the two-prong approach is common in consumer habits (official marketing vs. reviews). They still haven't, for the most part. But then MS still has the confusing ads out there like the one that shows Surface and then pans to some guy using it with a stylus--obviously the Pro. The hell, man.
I'm not sure what MS could have done with the naming issue. They dropped RT from Surface RT because it was 'confusing', but then what about Windows RT? It stands for run-time, but no one knows what the hell that is. I wish they figured out a good parallelism because Surface RT/Windows RT vs. Surface Pro/Windows Pro makes more sense than Surface 2/Windows RT vs. Surface Pro 2/Windows Pro with the old batch being just Surface/Windows RT now.
Microsoft was impatient. Rather than building convergence slowly and intelligently, they dropped the whole load with Windows 8.0. It was a shock to people. And it made little sense to have a touch-optimized UI for devices without touchscreens. Including a touchscreen on a notebook is nonsensical to most people (those that I know anyways). I just bought a Lenovo notebook this past weekend, kind of an ultrabook formfactor at introductory pricing. It has a touchscreen. That makes no sense to me at all. The Surface however, makes perfect sense.
Eventually, Microsoft will get it. But not without a lot of bad press.
Definitely, their biggest mistake there was first releasing Windows 8 long before the touchscreen "model" devices in October 2012; on top of that, despite the awesome hatred people had for the UI on their non-touch desktops, MS didn't release the little UI retouches until a year later (like matching background, the fake start button). I think they're just banking on sheer gorilla-inertia, which is very risky in the consumer space but not as much in the corporate space (which evolves slowly anyway, so maybe Windows 8 will be better for non-touch corp environments in the next few years when they finally start to adopt--hey, my department just got Windows 7!).
Win8.1 is probably what the 8.0 release in August last year should've been; at least the fake start button would remind people that the start menu = start screen. But by gum, it's still annoying to use without a touchscreen.
My dad recently bought a crappy-ass netbook for $200. He was so proud because it was fucking cheap. Some HP thing. Well, you get what you pay for. The pixels are so huge with poor resolution that they're completely visible and the picture is grainy. There's a dent in the touchpad. The most crappy lump of plastic ever. But the worst part was trying to use Windows 8 without a touchscreen. The store app popped up at some point while I was visiting them and it wanted to install Windows 8.1, which is all great and stuff, but for a good moment there I couldn't figure out how to CLOSE the app because it's not like there's a "X" button anymore. And someone like my father who doesn't understand what AV and firewall software are for would never figure out keyboard shortcuts. Ugh, really.
Anyway, I don't expect Windows RT to "die" the way the pundits want it to, though I expect no matter how Microsoft handles the merging, the so-called journalists will still want to use those keywords for more traffic. MS can't win there. So far all we have now are rumors and more rumors, blah blah "internal sources," so I'm not even going to bother.
