"If WinFX (including Avalon and Indigo) are going to be available for WinXP and Win2003. What is going to be the point of Longhorn?"
So wrote one developer on Microsoft's bulletin boards, and that person certainly has a good point. If Windows XP will inherit certain technologies that were originally slated only for inclusion in Longhorn, which have now been decoupled from that OS, then what is the point in Longhorn? It won't be the new haven of technological advances we were promised because WinFS will be missing (new technology file system that puts a database at the heart of the disk file system), and Avalon and Indigo will be made to be Windows XP compliant. One wonders actually what will be different about Longhorn in the end - if anything - from what Windows XP will eventually become.