Windows Trips Up H-P's Giant 'iPad' Bet

Touch deployments will be complex, but this migration to touch control sounds like just the star power H-P needs, save one critical detail: Unlike Apple -- which controls its own software destiny -- H-P relies on others for its code, namely Microsoft(MSFT) .

So how will Microsoft's evolving software fit with H-P's evolving hardware? Not easily.

Marenin confirms that each version of H-P's touch technology will have to support each type of Windows operating systems. If you're keeping score at home, that means today's touch capacitance technology will need to work for Windows 7 and 8. And so will tomorrow's optical touch technology. That ignores potential issues raised by other evolving operating systems that can also run on H-P boxes: Linux, Google(GOOG) Chrome and whatever other OS develops in the coming years.

All that means that H-P's quest for touch-enabled wow factor -- the much-needed Apple oomph H-P and its investors are banking on --- will take place in a terribly complex software environment.

And that will almost certainly slow and confuse deployment. Meaning Whitman, H-P and investors will pretend to be Apple for a long, long time indeed.

Yes, friends, two minutes of Apple glamour really does take eight hours of work.