About that Mac mini comment: Here's to the hope that the Mac mini gets a clue from the unibody MacBooks and lets users install RAM and harddrive themselves easily. Yeah, it hasn't been Apple's thing in the past, but the MacBook and MBP shows that they can and currently are willing to do it. But that's off-topic.
About the Win7 thing: I don't think MS will walk off their long-trodden paths too much. The same things that have been irritating us in the past will continue to do so in the future. In other ways, maybe. Remember how Windows XP suddenly got that ugly Fisher-Price look? It was toy-like at best. Today it's called the more professional alternative, because Vista has taken its cues from 3D games instead of a user interface handbook. I'm not entirely sure Microsoft gets that at all, but from what I've seen about Win7 by now, I just don't think so.
I mean: Take a look at
image 23 of that gallery... Don't they see how that upper lip is plain ugly? I don't see any way to see this any differently.
Or
this one... They seem to have quite an issue with space. It doesn't look right. At all.
Much worse, though: It's not gonna feel right. Microsoft hasn't tried to get the "feel" part of "look & feel" right. They've played with effects of menus fading etc. and they've been playing with transparency effects lately, but they just haven't actually looked at GUIs that _do_ feel right. I fully expect them to release some kind of new mouse next year with force-feedback to add effects to handling Windows 7. It'll feel even more like a computer game, and that might attract the game folks, actually, but they won't get it right. History proves it. They just don't get these things.