I wonder how the apps are going to play out. XNA is used for the games and there are plenty of shops out there creating for xbox. It looks like porting existing XNA games to the phone will be fairly straightforward. I'm expecting Windows Phone 7 to be a big player in handheld gaming because of XNA/Xbox.
I'm primarily a .Net/Silverlight dev myself so I'm biased but the core development experience is better than Apple/Google IMHO. They do need to get off their asses and release more controls (like the pivot) or they aren't going to have standardized UI across apps.
This is where MS can get the upper hand. If they are open enough with their app store, they can get developers there as the developer experience is going to be very good.
Its a chicken and egg thing though, most serious developers won't code for it until there is a market. Though they will get a fair few .NET developers who haven't done any Android or Objective-C iPhone stuff.
Yes and no. I have to admit I hoped for the ability to install any app you like (like in former versions of WinMo). Sadly that is no longer the case.
Silverlight/XNA development is fully OK for me, but it seems a tad restricted. Especially without the ability to run Silverlight in the browser, something which really, really surprised me when I heard it (at least that's what I got told on the Windows Phone 7 developer session).
I'm primarily a .Net/Silverlight dev myself so I'm biased but the core development experience is better than Apple/Google IMHO. They do need to get off their asses and release more controls (like the pivot) or they aren't going to have standardized UI across apps.