Reminds me of OS/2: a great OS with expensive development tools, and some of us remember how it ended... except that Windows 8 is not so great in comparison with contemporaries.
I remember reading a Jerry Porunelle column where he described the difference between talking to IBM and Microsoft at COMDEX that year (1991?). IBM was charging something like $400 for its driver development kit at the time. He said "if I go over to the Microsoft booth and tell them I want to write device drivers for Windows, they'll stuff diskettes in my bag".
But I'm sure IBM was thinking "if you're making hardware devices why couldn't you afford $400 for a OS/2 driver developer license?" Like Microsoft's dim early understanding of open source software, completely missing the point.
I hope Ubuntu exploits this opportunity.