Great way to pick an editor theme/style here http://studiostyl.es/ (It's specifically for Visual Studio but I'm sure you can adapt one of the many themes to you editor of choice, or generate a completely new one)
>>Here are most of the contents of my C:\UTILS folder. These are all well loved and used. I wouldn't recommend them if I didn't use them constantly. Things on this list are here because I dig them<<
Sounds more like you just didn't know what you were doing to be honest.
We can ignore your Prism complaints because that was simply your choice of MVVM frameworks as you mentioned. MVVMLight supports passing event arguments to View Models quite easily.
You didn't mention what you didn't like about the VSM, but even there, you didn't have to use it.
Lastly, layout...of all things, is done absolutley right in Silverlight compared to the non-intuitive HTML way.
The implications are obvious. Currently where I work (a large investment bank) I've seen a few iPads carried around mostly by executives. They are typically used to view web reports and email. Thats it.
What Micsosoft is trying to do is change that such that you can use your tablet for work once you get back to your desk.
If they can solve the battery life issue (and I'm glad they mentioned it at least) then they might have a compelling device going forward.
The alternatives are nowhere near as lucrative.