I've played with the Windows 7 pre-beta, it just looks like a more polished Vista.
All the Control Panel things that under Vista look like the XP versions have been changed. Since one of the biggest problems people have with Vista is that everything has been moved I don't see that helping much.
As to the touch-screen stuff, I don't have a machine I can test that on unfortunately.
I've not heard anything specifically called "Windows 8", but I have been following Singularity on occasion, which was a "research operating system" that MS produced back in 2005 (
http://research.microsoft.com/os/Singularity/ -- Take a look at the presentations if you're interested in this sort of stuff), which uses a modified version of C# and a minor amount of C to create a very "safe" environment.
More recently Midori was announced, which sounds to be the continuation of Singularity within MS. The company is saying it's still a research OS, but there's speculation it will take over from Windows.
If you're interested in that sort of stuff, there's a few open source projects emulating singularity to greater or lesser degrees: SharpOS, Cosmos and another I forget the name of.
SharpOS seems to have stalled in recent months, Cosmos seems the most active.
The main difference between these and Singularity is that they tend to use "pure" C# rather than a modified version.
