Virtualize the UI?

It was interesting listening to the designer comments and reading the reactions. It seems to me that the time to virtualize the UI has arrived. This mean extending the presentation adaptions for mouse/touch, keyboard/virtual kb, screen sizes, etc, right down into the presentation design. I can't see it would actually be that much more work and it would allow users to choose the presentation paradigm.

I'd been thinking of this in terms of my 82 year old mother for whom moving from Win7 to Win8 would be just too much. Just trying to get her to just shift email clients is actaully too much, let alone a complete OS paradigm shift. In a couple of years - if she's still around - it will be a case of staying with an unsupported OS or moving to something close to the old UI like Linux perhaps. There are a lot of people in similar in the same or similar floating transportation systems.

(I've also thought that there should be more emphasis on building systems that adapt to the expertise level of the user, rather than designers trying to adapt all levels of users to their one slick and sexy interface. Design treads various trade-off lines including a big one between obvious easy usability on one hand, and sexy newness on the other. This line is actually different for users, but vendors and designers want a one size that fits all product. There's even an element I-get-it-you-don't to many products that, like teenage buzzwords, exclude the uncool. Exclusivity requires exclusion.)

The alternative would be to use a CSS-like presentation approach to the whole UI. Your open applications could then appear as Win8 rectangles, start strip icons, phone popup list items, or whatever they come up with next. Notifications would be sent through the preferred notification paradigm and shake, rattle, pop or coalesce.