There’s a good post over at Vertigo discussing the future of virtualisation in MS. I started my career doing desktop deployment projects, so the idea of virtual desktops is something I’ve kept an eye on over the years. It one of those things that has been promising lots for a long time but never really delivered. I know there are some organisations using virtual desktops successfully, but from what I’ve seen it tends to be for very specific requirements, and as deployment of traditional OS’s has got easier uptake seems to have been quite limited.
The Calista deal is interesting because the technology has the potential to remove one of the big obstacles to wide scale adoption, the user experience. Alongside the other technologies in it’s portfolio MS should now be quite well placed to deliver true virtual and streamed desktops. How about a world where your PC boot’s off the network, a Hyper-V hypervisor is streamed into RAM and then connects to a VM desktop running on a server in an (MS Hosted?) data centre? Sounds kinda cool to me. 
