Agreed- a new, more secure OS will need other good qualities to actually market itself on.

One idea that could improve both security and the ecosystem would be a capability based design. Separating components through standard protocols/interfaces could enable something like current mobile permissions to be backed by different implementations (including virtualized/sandboxed ones), in some cases swapped out by users like commands in a shell pipeline.

I haven't seen much work in this direction; does anybody think this would or wouldn't work?