Digital Home Thoughts: The HP Slate Device

Engadget has a brief post about the forthcoming HP slate - notice how "slate" is the buzz-word this year at CES - but no one knows much about it yet. HP didn't have it out for display at the press conference event I attended last night (yeah, I'm at CES!), but we know that it's going to be running Windows. The question, as always, is how well can Windows 7 work on a small-screen device? Windows doesn't have a very flexible UI - there are assumptions about the screen size of the device being a certain size, and once you get below the 9 inch range, you start to get into problems being able to hit touch targets. Windows 7 is the best of all Microsoft OS' in terms of having reasonably-sized UI elements - the new taskbar area for instance has nice, big icons. Windows isn't designed for touch though, so how well will a device like this work? What do you think?