During part of a keynote featuring Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates at the D: All Things Digital Conference, Microsoft Corporate VP Julie Larson-Green (who previously led the team redesigning the MS Office UI) demonstrated the multi-touch features, taken from MS Surface that will be part of Windows 7. Included in the demo were photographs being organized, maps, a paint program, and a piano program. A touch-screen laptop and a tablet PC were used during the demo.
Video: Multi-Touch in Windows 7
Following the demo there was numerous blog postings and comments bashing the idea of including multi-touch in Windows 7. Clearly multi-touch is only useful in some cases and not others. I really don’t see a use when writing code, but it would be useful on a large monitor or a tablet during a design session.