His demonstration showed it running the Kindle book-reading software under Windows 7, taking advantage of its touch-screen technology (or “touch-screen experience” as he put it).

Reaction to this product, and similar devices by Archos and Pegatron, was luke-warm.  Nobody was seeing anything new.  It didn’t appear to be much more than the XP-based Tablet PC that Microsoft attempted to introduce way back in 2002.

Personally, I have a Hewlett Packard hx4700 PDA running Pocket PC 2003.  This device was released as long ago as 2004.  I use it with Adobe Reader to read books that I have created from text files downloaded from Project Gutenberg.  Ok, the screen on my PDA is nowhere near the size of the Slate PC, but it is touch-sensitive and I use it to scroll the page while reading.  How does that differ from what Steve Ballmer was demonstrating?

Of course, the new device, running Windows 7 is much more powerful than my PDA, and can run a whole range of Windows software.   With all the glitz and hype surrounding the Windows 7 launch, why wasn’t the demonstration a bit more exciting?

I suspect that this device, being a prototype, doesn’t reliably run much else.  The other Slate PCs by Archos and Pegatron were shown displaying a video and what looked like a web browser.  perhaps they weren’t capable of running much else, either.

There are rumours about a similar device from Apple – dubbed the iSlate.  With the huge popularity of the iPhone and iPod products, people are likely to wait for the release of an iSlate before getting excited about a Windows 7 based device.  After all, Apple seem to be setting the standards for mobile devices and their user interfaces.

Initially this will be good news to the European Commission – it looks as if Microsoft are removing their browser to give people the choice of downloading and installing an alternative, such as Opera or Firefox.

But did they really think this through?  When the European Commission take delivery of their shiny new Windows 7 PCs, they will have no browser with which to download their favourite browser.  Of course there’s nothing to stop them from downloading it using another PC, but by complying with the EC’s wishes, Microsoft have cleverly introduced an annoyance that is bound to cause an uproar.

Anyone who upgrades their PC from a previous version of Windows will, of course, have their favourite browser already installed.  But new Windows 7 PCs will not have one.

And there’s another twist to this.  I just installed Windows XP SP2 on a new hard disk.  I fired up Opera to go and download SP3, and it wouldn’t let me.  It insisted that I use Internet Explorer to obtain the Service Pack.

I doubt whether that’s going to change with Windows 7.