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The amazing truth is, despite the orgiastic deluge of Windows 8-related news that we’ve reported this week, there’re still a ton of features, changes, and clarifications that we haven’t even begun to cover. With the Build Windows conference over, however, it’s now time to fill in the gaps. It will now be a matter of weeks or months until Microsoft releases another public build, and so we finally have a chance to contemplate the repercussions of what we’ve learnt over the last week.

Windows 8 is so conceptually and paradigmatically different from its predecessors that it’s actually quite hard to mentally grasp. Is it a desktop OS, tablet OS… or both? What about phones; it runs on ARM tablets, so what about ARM smartphones? Will it eventually replace Windows Phone 7? Windows 8 really is a re-imagining of what Windows is, and something of a rebirth for Microsoft, so you would be forgiven for not knowing the answers to these questions. There’s a slew of really cool features that have been drowned out by the introduction of Metro — security improvements, power consumption tweaks, cloud integration… and more!

Read on, and we’ll do our best to explain exactly what Windows 8 is, and more importantly what it isn’t.