Well all I can tell you is they said it would be free to switch for schools. It might be free to switch for anyone? We on't know.
The performance factor, is something they mentioned in the talk, but for some reason everyone's been fixated on the store-only thing.
I want someone to get in there and benchmark/real-time test this beast and tell us for sure - is windows s faster? If it is, that's very important IMO.
If it is, it's not windows lite, its windows streamlined. And that has some appeal, especially as you say, for low end hard-ware. Come on guys give us some real answers on windows s! test that beast, get under the hood!
My guess would be it is, and they stripped services down to achieve it. But I wanna know, and I want someone to actually talk about it.
Get yourselves a PC with some low specs. A tablet, whatever. Time the app loading, and logging in time. Time multi-tasking. There's a UWP for video editing - time some damned video crunching on pro versus s. Please god, let us know lol!