Metro applications are necessarily fuss free. The motto of the Metro app is "Fierce reduction of unnecessary elements."
Whatever the platform upon which the application runs, the idea is to deliver all the necessary information and no more. A little of this philosophy was seen in recent versions of Windows Media Centre in which a the strongly linear navigation model coupled with sparse graphics and screens which are dedicated to one simple purpose are found. This has two important effects. Firstly there is a lower compute cost for the UI. Secondly, the display size doesn't matter. This is good for televisions because on the Media Centre you are probably looking at the screen from across the room and good for set-top boxes that run embedded Windows but have little available extra processor power for generating blurred drop-shadows or halo effects.
Windows 7 has been demonstrated to be running natively on ARM chips and what better low-power platform for consumer devices than the ubiquitous ARM core? Refrigerators, dvd players and yes, even toasters will soon be equipped with a graphical user interface that doesn't rely on a crummy bespoke LCD display panel and a processor as competent at that in your cellphone.
So, the paradigm of large-screen-far-away can also be used on small-screen-close-to with equally useful effect. A clean interface delivering just as much as you need with no more frills and nothing unnecessary is the ideal one for these applications and Metro fits that bill down to a tee.
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