I have a suspicion that they will focus heavily on ie because of windows phone 7 - they desperately need developers, and will do whatever they can to get them on their new mobile platform, be it native or web-apps. (this all relies on the desktop and mobile versions of ie sharing a codebase.
I should have looked at your comment before posting my own similar comment, but I wanted to add that the codebase sharing is almost a given. With Windows 8 being ported to ARM one can only assume it's to bring a very full implementation of Windows to the mobile market.
full implementation? If I were to create Windows for ARM, I would take the opportunity to get rid of as much ballast as possible. Examples:
- ditch all non-Unicode APIs
- ditch a zillion older/ancient graphics technologies
- ditch a zillion older/ancient database access layers
- get rid of that ROM-based font and character mode displays
- ditch various shims for older software (yes, it would be cool to download Visicalc from http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm and run it, but it is not that necessary, and my feature list would not contain a X86 emulator, anyways)
