>I think it's even more than that. If you take a play around with Blue you'll notice that all the things that caused you to go to the desktop are now being put in the metro interface - so I think that not only is that start button for sure not coming back - but I think the plan is to get rid of desktop all together.

This will be an immense cost to everybody... who ever listened to what M$ was saying at the time, and inserted a "then save it to your desktop" in the instructions to their apps. They'll have to rewrite a lot :).