There’s been a lot of buzz about Microsoft’s Windows 8 tablets, which will feature a new interface, derived from the Zune portable media player and the promise of more powerful hardware.

You can view a high-level comparison of WIndows 8 and the Apple iPad above.

While the release of Windows 8 tablets is still far off, it’s already got some readers wondering if it will offer a viable and possibly more powerful alternative to iOS. But, based on what we’ve seen, Microsoft is following Apple’s lead and breaking support for desktop apps.

Reader John Smith wrote in to note that WIndows 8 tablets, based on ARM chips, won’t support MIDI, either:

Microsoft is making Windows 8 ARM into a walled garden platform with only official APIs allowed. This makes it doubtful we’ll ever see things like ASIO or OpenGL support on ARM.

That is bad, but what is even worse is there is no support for MIDI at all on Windows 8 ARM.

I hope all of you will got to the following post where Microsoft acknoledges this and make your own post to this thread and show Microsoft that there should be MIDI support for Windows 8 ARM.

This isn’t a complete show-stopper for music apps on Windows 8 tablets. Remember that MIDI support was missing in action on iOS when it was first introduced.

But dreams of running Sonar or Live on a WIndows 8 tablet are going to remain dreams for a while.

What do you think of Microsoft’s Windows 8 tablet announcement? Do you think it will become a viable alternative to iOS for mobile music making?