Among desktop users, Windows 8's user interface has been met with a lukewarm reception, inspiring a recurring refrain: "Why have they put a tablet interface on my desktop system?" That Windows 8 is actually suitable for and effective on touch-driven tablets has been almost taken for granted.

A successful entry into the tablet market demands a strong touch interface. The competition from the iPad is stiff, and the iPad's iOS has five years of user interface refinement under its belt. Has Microsoft really gotten it right with Windows 8 and touch?

Kinda.

Touch is baked into the basic Windows 8 interface, and it shows up in the core, universal interactions that bring up the operating system's user interface: swipes from the right screen edge bring up the charms bar, those from the left edge switch apps or bring up the task switcher, and swipes from top or bottom bring up each application's toolbar-style app bar.

As concerned as I am about the comparable mechanisms for mouse and keyboard users, these touch gestures work really well. Task switching in particular is great; flicking back and forth between apps is effortless. It makes the original iPad, where you either had to bounce between apps via the home screen, or double tap the home button to select from a "taskbar," look like something from a bygone era. (Though as of iOS 5, Apple added some four and five finger gestures to allow navigation without the button.)

Windows 8 at its heart is a solid, well designed, touch-friendly operating system. Microsoft has shown that once it sets out to produce a touch-friendly operating system, it can do so well, which makes you wonder why it took the company so long.

While Microsoft has been trying to crack the tablet market for almost twenty years now, Windows 8 is in some ways a version 1 product. It's the first time Microsoft has actually built a tablet operating system with a genuine attempt at a touch interface (compared to previous efforts that attempted to make tablet users wrestle with the traditional desktop interface), and only the second time that Microsoft has built a genuine touch interface at all (the first being Windows Phone).

Unfortunately, all of this excellent touch work hasn't gone quite far enough—even tablet users who want to live their lives wholly in Metro are in for some pain.

Touch-first design

The overall experience of using Metro on a touch machine is a pleasing one. The bold design aesthetic forms a natural home for controls that are comfortably finger-sized, and though the apps we have available at the moment are all quite limited in their capabilities, Windows 8 nails the basic touch interactions. And the way the operating system uses touch gets more interesting when you look at the details.

The touch parts of Windows 8 feel touch native in a way that I don't think anything else quite manages. I don't mean any disservice to Apple's engineers; Apple has plainly done more than anyone else to make touch devices mainstream, and Apple's vocabulary of swiping, panning, and two finger zooming has become the industry standard. But iOS has some bits and pieces, like that hardware home button, that aren't touch-based or aren't quite comfortable on touch systems. I don't get the same feeling on Windows 8.

For example, consider the "long press" gesture. "Long press" (where instead of tapping on something you press it for a second or two) is a long-standing feature of touch interfaces. Microsoft's many attempts at a stylus-driven touch interface used it to emulate right click. iOS, Android, and Windows Phone all use it.

But "long press" is annoying to use. There's no fluidity to it. You just have to stop what you're doing and wait—one second, two seconds—for the thing to register. It doesn't matter how swift and fluent you are with the rest of the gestures, everything's on hold while you long press. It's a hangover from the early touch interfaces where the designers were trying to mimic the mouse; since the mouse has two buttons, they needed to distinguish between "left click" and "right click" in tap contexts.

Staying fluid

Windows 8 supports long press in various places, but Microsoft has made a deliberate effort not to need it: regular, everyday tasks should all be possible without long pressing. iOS, for example, uses long press to switch its home screen user interface, Springboard, from its normal app launcher mode into "icons jiggling around" mode, where you can drag the icons around, move them into folders, and switch them between screens.

The Start screen in Windows 8 supports essentially the same operations—you can move the live tiles between groups, get rid of them entirely, or otherwise organize them as you see fit. But instead of using clumsy long presses to allow this organization, Windows 8 uses nudges and drags. Flick a live tile up or down, and it will gain a selection box, providing the ability to remove it or change its behavior in some way. (For example, you can turn off its live updates, or switch between single and double-width tiles.) Want to pick up a tile to move around? Just drag it up (or down) and it comes loose.

We see a similar attitude toward the often awkward task of selecting text to copy or paste it. This is an area where long presses are typical, along with other mechanisms such as magnifying glasses to make fine manipulations easier. Windows 8 does away with the long press in favor of something that should feel a bit more direct: you just tap.

The system is a minor evolution of the mechanism used in Windows Phone. Tap in a piece of selectable text and a kind of inverted lollipop appears. Drag the lollipop left or right and it grows to produce another lollipop, with the text between the two lollies being selected. Tap the blob on the end of the stick and cut and paste options appear. If you have something on the clipboard already, tapping the blob also gives you a paste option.

(Where tapping already has a meaning, such as visiting links in webpages, Windows 8 still supports long pressing to enable highlighting and copying text.)

None of this is revolutionary. The text selection system in Android is very similar, but it's initiated with a long press (some of the time, at least; editable text fields don't need the long press).

On their own, these are all small details, but together they mean that the Windows 8 touch interface goes as fast as I can control it, without the speed bumps other platforms have.