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IMHO, Laurens shows himself to be either ignorant of recent history or blinded by a all too narrow view of the OS spectrum.
What Palm seems to be doing is not something new or novel in any way. There is very successful precedent in recent history that is very successful. This was done by Apple. They totally abandoned the MacOS and ported the "Mac experience" (a.ka. UI) to a top-level UI sitting on top of a Unix kernal. This was a vastly successful move as anyone who is aware of the world outside of PDA's and other portable devices.
Perhaps the most noteable failure in such an attempt was Next. Its failure was largely due to its introduction of a new UI with no legacy applications and users, though certainly, Jobs' narrow personal view of what the machine should be like and what it should do hobbled the machine and OS for too long. It should be noted that Jobs' did a very successful job of having Next "buy" Apple :-) and the second attempt, MacOSX, was successful.
Palm can make this port work iff (iff="if and only if") they successfully support legacy applications _and_ manage to make the more complex (read: more opportunity for bugs and misdesign) OS package reliable. To date, Palm has been successful largely because the OS is a "lean clean fighting machine". WindowsCE and all of its clan have had a long hard fight to make it in the device/PDA market largely because the OS is bulky, complex, and less reliable.
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