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The20
psychic stalker
On a relevant tangent, this is why I've been saying for quite a while that the desktop metaphor and WIMP UI are broken and need to be rethought:

Although desktop OSes typically present applications in windows, with actions (usually) represented by icons and accessed by menus, with files in folders scattered about a desktop, these metaphors don't actually reflect how anyone uses the computer, and it's a strained metaphor when dealing with data and working with software.
Explain please: how does it not reflect how people use computers and what is the problem with windows and what would you replace them with?
How doesn't it? This is something no one seems willing to discuss because they don't stop to consider how their computers make things more difficult for them.

Windows should not overlap the way they end up doing in most environments. Many programs are more useful and users are more efficient with tiling window management. But few windowing systems even support it, let alone support it well, and even fewer programs are designed with responsive UIs that can fit comfortably into tiling environments.

Menus are an inefficient, broken concept. Their existence should be minimized and common functionality should be brought to the foreground. Microsoft's Ribbon UI was a good start in exploring better ways to make this functionality available, but users are too cowardly to accept ideas that might benefit them. More experimentation needs to be done, but no one will allow UI designers to even try. All they do is complain that it's different. Of course it's different. We can't find something better if we don't look at things differently!

The mouse pointer is frequently inadequate, even in the two dimensions it was designed for. There's room for improvement here, and I've pointed out several alternative input devices in this very forum that could be a better way to handle that kind of input. I'm not going to repeat myself here. I'm sick of repeating myself.

And no one truly treats their computer as holding a collection of files in file folders. They treat it as categorized data. Folders are absurdly inadequate, because there is very little data that fits cleanly into a strict hierarchical tree. Many "files" belong in several "folders," just to use one painfully obvious example. File portability is poor - there are too many formats for a given type of data - we need to reduce to a single file format for every single type of data, and advocate for complete portability between software tools, and eliminate the entire concept of "folders" as a way to categorize data.

We also need to do away with the notion of a "desktop." Would you have vaguely-labeled file folders scattered about your desk in a haphazard way? Of course not. The desktop just encourages messiness and distracts users from actually doing something with their data. I mean, that's why we all have computers, right? So we can do something with our data. So, let's explore different workspace concepts, and quit bitching when Microsoft changes some little ******** thing that doesn't even matter.
The20
What would be a good replacement? What capabilities would the system need to implement it and how do you make it handicapped accessible, or do you ignore that for the time being (it would certainly make things easier)?
Would you keep files at all? If so, would you keep folders or would you sort files by some other means?
What would you replace menus with? Ribbons may work to some degree, but they require a lot more screen space (the necessary size of the elements won't make this any less of a problem in a touch environment - of course i'm just assuming you're imagining a touch environment here, but you did mention tablet UIs ...)
I don't know. That's my point. Users don't let anyone experiment and so we get stuck with these idiotic ******** WIMP GUIs that are painfully slow to use and make getting actual work done nearly impossible.

And we get stuck with these idiotic hierarchical filesystems because everyone is too afraid of breaking backward compatibility and try something new for a ******** change. Be, Inc. had something going with the Be File System. It's an experiment no one has since bothered to repeat. And Microsoft gave up on WinFS, apparently because they can't beat it into this idiotic WIMP UI that no one is willing to give up.

And of course everyone ******** hates the Ribbon UI, and no one is willing to acknowledge that it doesn't go far enough.

And then everyone bitched and moaned about how they hate Windows 8's metro UI, without stopping for a moment and asking themselves if maybe, perhaps, the start menu is an idiotic ******** concept that should have been killed off two ******** decades ago, but they're too cowardly and stupid to try anything new.

And if I seem angry about this, it's because I am. No one agrees with me, and I'm getting sick of advocating necessary changes to people who won't even ******** consider what I'm saying.