pparks, for touch to work good on a Desktop, you can't use it like a normal monitor that is vertically upright and three feet away from you. This won't work ergonomically. As for smudging, you know, I kind of call BS on that. I've been checking out the touch AIO PCs at my local best buy, and I use them to play around with, other people do. I remember a month ago when a friend of mine and I went to go check them out, we spent a good amount of time with the touch AIOs. After doing some hypothetical situations with touch, I put the PC to sleep to check out the smudging on it. To my surprise, the screen wasn't too smudged up as I thought it would be. I have a feeling that because the touch AIO PCs have better cooling than a smartphone, the screen is less warm, as was the case with me. A screen that isn't warm doesn't transfer skin oils that well. Anyways...
Now I do know that touch in mainstream use is going to take a long time. I don't refute that or call BS on it as it will take a long time for old PCs to die and for people to upgrade to a new one. There was once an article I read in a tech magazine I found from like 1996 about LCD monitor technology and how better it was overall versus CRT monitors. It said that it will take about a good decade before LCD monitors will be the mainstream and most commonly used. About 10 or years after that article, LCD monitors are the ONLY thing you can find these days, actually even years before that they were as well. The SAME will happen with touch monitors. When screen makers are building touch monitors, and they account for at least 40% of the monitors and screens they build, touch won't be blown off as a phase and be more something to be afraid of....
And yes alphanumeric, I do brag about using my Microsoft Touch Mouse. Why? It's a touch gestured mouse, of course! With Windows 7, a quick swipe of two fingers snaps a window left, and then you can snap another window to the right. Three finger gesture and open up a window picker or show the Desktop. In Windows 8, those same gestures can be used if you'd like, or you can use those to do new things. Left two finger gesture left brings up the charms, right switches apps. Three finger gesture can be used as middle click (pretty tricky to do, I don't use it) or bring up the app command bar. Touch gesturing is a step away from full on touch. Companies like Logitech know this as that's why they're offering new touch gesture mice and input devices for Windows 8. Instead of ditching your newish LCD monitor that works fine for a touch monitor, you don't have to. If you want to upgrade any bit of hardware of Windows 8, upgrade your mouse to a touch enabled mouse or pad. Which is nice considering Windows 8 is light on system resource, the normal consideration of more RAM or a new graphics card and such isn't something of consideration anymore, the consideration is more for upgrading input devices.
Personally, with a touch screen monitor and speech recognition going, I honestly might ditch using it. I'll keep though as it's pretty and the box is pretty too.
