I know mouser has talked about merging FARR and LBC in the past years. After seeing a demonstration of Windows 8 Metro UI, I'm absolutely convinced it is nothing more than a fancy launcher. I love the concept of grid layouts for organizing your screen's content, I've mentioned it before for websites. It's a really great way to make a touch interface.
If FARR and LBC could be merged together, it would really offer everything all these companies are struggling with as far as touch interfaces. Apple has it pretty good, with how smooth theirs is. The proprietary overlays on the Android devices are consistently sluggish and not very elegant. People are making a HUGE deal about metro UI, which is puzzling to me because I don't see it being any more important or "big" of an idea than LBC. Imagine if the front page of all the tech magazines were freaking out about LBC, or FARR, or Truelaunchbar...that's what it feels like to me. It's really not that big of a deal to me.
Anyway, right now LBC can organize all the toolbar contents using a tree hierarchy and the several toolbar display options. All that would need to be added is a grid layout management area somehow, and it would be everything Metro UI is trying to be. if you wanted to get really fancy, you can make widgets or plugins (like in FARR) to do interesting things inside each tile, like show an animated gif, or a video, or some live text/graphics.
