Windows Phone 7 System - what IS the point?

Microsoft have been, of late, telling us lots and lots about their new phone OS, which will come out at the end of the year. Some of this is of the 'ooh, look, pretty interface' variety, but some is more in-depth.

First, it'll have an app store, which will be the sole method of distributing apps. Where have we heard this before? It will also disallow proper multitasking, but will fake it with notifications. Sound familiar?

Shockingly, however, there is some departure from the 'copy Steve's shiny gadget' theme. Developers will not be allowed to use sockets, and there will be no database provided. There will be no native code.

Let me repeat that. No sockets. No database. No native code.

Predicted results:

WPS7 joins Palm Pre in that distinguished class of phones which never get an ssh client. It will also lack things like IRC clients, and indeed anything which is either realtime or where the service provider is unable or unwilling to route things through Microsoft's notification service.

Developers will be limited to .NET libraries (and .NET libraries written in C#, at that, it appears), which will presumably slow and discourage development. With the iPhone, if you want to do something fairly common, you just pick up the appropriate C library.

Developers will make their own crazy flatfile data stores, which will, of course, corrupt themselves with wild abandon. This will all be blamed on Microsoft, as it should be. Apparently, you are meant to store user data in the Cloud (capitalisation theirs, not mine), over HTTP (no sockets here!), but really, that's not going to work for apps storing private data, or for apps designed to be used where a network is unavailable, and I fail to see how it's desirable for the bulk of data-oriented apps.

I can sort of see where they're coming from with the C# code only thing. It should make the device rather easier to secure. The other two, though, are just weird and arbitrary, but they're clearly deliberate; the platform that the WPS7 thing is derived from (Silverlight) has sockets, and you can't tell me that there are no .NET SQLite equivalents they could have slotted in.

The whole thing is ridiculous, and it is going to fail in a big way.