This looks like a great read. It must have been challenging to do a decent arcade conversion for the 8 bit home computers. The spectrum was probably slower than the z80 sound cpu in the arcade board.
It will be interesting to hear how much noise an F-E car will produce. It's a big part of the atmosphere at an F1 event. I've seen some TTXGP bikes race and it is eerily quiet.
The company I work for is going in the opposite direction. I'll be expected to learn PHP soon after spending years developing with .NET. I'd much prefer to be switching to Ruby or Python. Anyway if you want to switch to Ruby on Rails in future you won't have a massive leap. ASP.NET MVC is very similar.
In the UK we have Santa Pod which runs Top Fuel drag races. Its definitely an experience. I have been to a few F1 races and the top fuel dragsters are noisier.
They are only giving the hardware away to developers who have already published an application in the store. I think its a pretty good decision by MS as they are targeting developers who have at least shipped something. I don't know if I would want to switch away from android/ios though. I don't think MS will abandon the platform but I think they will end up abandoning silverlight in the future.