How Office will be THE BEST way to work on your tablet PC
One word: Smart Client. (reminds me of a funny line from some movie-- I think it was Mr. Mom with Michael Keaton)
Just sitting in a session at Windows Anywhere with Marcus Egger speaking about "Data Access Anywhere", and Marcus says basically that "browser based applications are a cop out". Ok, he didn't actually say that, but let me explain how he hit the nail on the head. For several years now, web apps have been pervasive-- all the rage… doesn't do much for knowledge workers who oh, say, work in remote locations, or can't connect to the web at will. His suggestion was that smart clients are harder for developers to make work in disconnected ways, but have way bigger payoff (if the development is done properly) for the end user--- and isn't that what will keep us as developers working?
Enter Office. You've got 3 beautiful Smart Clients (Word, Excel, and InfoPath) that can use managed code, have wicked XML capabilities, and have varying degrees of "offline" capability out of the box. It seems to me that if you want a leg up on your smart client development, you NEED to check out
Visual Studio Tools for Office.