I think you've hit the nail on the head here. I would even take this thought further and say people want the features of the apps - but not necessarily segregated into distinct apps. Consider how poor the composition of various apps is today. The prevalent conception of 'operating system' and what it should provide can only result in another plethora of silo-ed apps. We need some major whole-system redesign.
If you're interested in operating systems along these lines, I'd recommend checking out Haiku OS. The OS provides a series of "kits" that form the basic building blocks of different types of application.
Yeah Haiku is definitely interesting and I'll take another look. I think the datatypes concept (originally from AmigaOS, and I assume also in Haiku?) is very powerful and mainstream operating systems haven't caught up yet. I am also interesting in questioning some core ideas such as file systems and processes (do we need them?), binary compilation and binding (can we maximize work in higher level language?) etc.
