"Hey, Linux Penguins, here's the new thing to clone. Good luck."

Start by giving them as much money as Microsoft has if you want to settle that kind of challenge.

WinFS equivalents are already available and/or in development: indexing DBs for filesystems, extensible metadata, distributed synchronization... The main innovation here is to integrate this into an OS with the largest market-share.

Aero and Avalon:
Linux already has had XAML-like solutions for a while now (Java thinklets, GTK's Glade XML UI descriptors, Mozilla's XUL).
Why weren't v1 winforms XML based? Why 2006?
On the rendering side, it is true X may need to get a boost. But who knows, maybe Apple will open source their Quartz engine (which is tomorrow's Aero today) at some point before 2006? ;-)

Indigo:
Aren't webservices supposed to be cross-platform? Where's the cloning in that? It's spec implementation...

I am not saying LongHorn won't be great, I actually think these will be great improvements and there will be many user-side improvements too, but I find it hard to hype a 2006 product that isn't as ground-breaking as Microsoft describes it.

It's not about pieces, it's about a platform. And that's groundbreaking.

Still has the "Start" button - not a good thing from a usability standpoint. Looks a lot like the XP desktop with washed out colors - and the XP desktop, IMHO, was a step down in usefulness from Win2000. XML UI specs... Wow, that's just - dull. VisualWorks (Smalltalk) has had spec driven (although not XML) UI's for over a decade now. Who exactly thinks this is innovative?

Tell me this - will they move the frelling graphics services OUT of the kernel so that Windows can be considered a reliable server platform? Or are they still trying to make Single person shooter addicts happier than server developers? If they graphics stuff is still in the kernel, then they still aren't serious.

Wake me when they find a clue.

I think it's the other way round. Windows clones Unices. But using windows means you are in a monoculture: Either you use it or not. But you have a very hard time only using the good bits of it. When will windows be a modular system? When will they start being truly innovative? (The best thing they did was supporting Web Services)

Just a few examples:
C# - Clone of Java
the GUI - already there before windows (X, Mac)
Internet Explorer - just a clone of Netscape / Mosaic (And they didn't do it themselves I think?)
Multithreading/processing - everything besides Dos / Windows
home directories - Unix, Mac,...

Some (short) time ago, we were told that .NET was the biggest innovation ever. And now? No more remoting, windows forms is also dead, asmx is also assimilated,... What's the next thing they will "invent"? A secure & standard conform Web Browser? A good EMail program? An easy to backup OS?
Hoping the best for the future...