This might be a non-issue. The only people who are likely to care about installing alternative operating systems are power users, and power users may still prefer to buy more powerful Intel systems.
As a power user, I'm still looking for a good ARM battery efficient 2-in-1 to use as a light laptop and tablet that runs Linux. Not to use as a production machine but for content consumption. Being able to continually read a book or article while coding or performing a task on production machine would be better then having to swap between the two on one computer. Wouldn't choose Intel for that.
Having more shipping ARM devices gets you closer to that, even if these devices have a locked bootloader. The more robust the ecosystem around ARM with UEFI gets, the more the parts become commodity and if there's enough demand, someone will start shipping them with Linux or unlocked bootloaders.
(Hate UEFI all you want, but standardizing on something is much better than the Android world where every SoC requires a custom bootloader and if the manufacturer doesn't support the kernel you want to run, tough. Having a standardized platform to run on means you can have a Linux distribution that supports running on any device that supports the standard.)
>The only people who are likely to care about installing alternative operating systems are power users, and power users may still prefer to buy more powerful Intel systems.
Traditionally, one of the ways people got into Linux was inheriting an old box and sticking Linux on it. You won't be able to do this anymore.
And as Intel will become more and more niche, it will get more expensive.
Can't help but think this was just a marketing error. Had they called the OS something like SurfaceOS instead of WinRT, perhaps the expectation would have been something more accepted, akin to iOS and MacOS.
Sadly they keep making that mistake by pushing for "Windows" for their mobile OS and as you mentioned, ARM OS as well. They really should not try to push "Windows" where it's not really wanted, but instead re-brand for other platforms, and allow it to all come together.
"Allowed" is a funny way of phrasing this. The technology Microsoft has built to run x86 Windows apps on ARM didn't exist when Windows RT was released.
I think that "allowed" is correct. A developer couldn't just recompile their desktop-style app into an ARM binary for RT, for example. They'd refuse to run, and not because of the CPU architecture. The only way to get third-party apps was through the Windows store, which only supports Metro apps. Metro apps had a limited API available to them.
