You're confusing a few things.
First off, aside from the Surface tablets, Microsoft is not a fully vertical supplier like Apple is. So it's a bit disingenuous to blame Microsoft for the likes of HP and Dell coming out with touch screen all-in-ones and just about everyone else piling on the touch screen laptop craze. They had no real control over what kinds of systems customers built.
Second, you can bet your last dollar Microsoft was fully aware of this from the beginning. Microsoft has been working on touch interfaces for a very long time, but most of it never made it out of the R&D labs. Originally what is now called Surface was intended to actually live up to the name. We're talking like a computer desk where the entire surface of the desk is a touch monitor. The major problem with that is it costs tens of thousands of dollars per unit so it wouldn't be profitable to sell.
Third, while tifkam is a bit odd on the desktop, it also is a rather limited and short-sighted view. Tifkam was always intended to be the first step on the road to convergence. For years Microsoft has been working on trying to bring it's phone/tablet, desktop and Xbox versions of Windows under the same roof, so to speak. Most of the under-the-hood changes are in place now and they all use the same OS kernel, meaning now they can start work on the UI side of things.
Here's where you run into a sort of catch-22 situation. People fear change. You look around and probably 99% of complaints about Windows 8 can be boiled down to either people not liking tifkam and/or that Microsoft moved the location of certain items that long-time users had become accustomed to being in a particular place. Oddly enough, as a side note, the much beloved Windows 7 moved a whole lot of things around compared to the also much beloved Windows XP, yet you rarely people complaining about it there, making the whole argument kind of fall flat with resounding thud. Back to the point, a company like Microsoft has two choices. Either A) You can dole it out in small incremental doses to let people gradually get used to the idea or B) you can dump a major change (like say the Windows 95 interface compared to 1.0-3.1). Each option has various pluses and minuses to it and at the end of the day you never know how people are going to react, so you have to make a choice and hope it works out. Any idiot can play Cap'n Hindsight over a year later and say they should have done things differently. Try working with imperfect information and having to do the best you can.
If you took 5-10 minutes to actually learn some of the behind the scene details, it will tend to change your perspective. Of course it also means you'll have to stop being a sycophantic hanger-on if you have any sense of integrity.

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