@TA152h: UNIX is a failure ever since it was created in 1970... Right.
A little history.
MSDOS was made as a dumbed down CPM - itself, a dumbed down UNIX. Remember, MSDOS was the OS MS sold for IBM, then added a GUI on top of it - up till Windows Millenium.
When that dumbed down OS stopped being manageable, MS switched to their VMS-like kernel: NT. That one uses protected memory space, preemptive multitasking, a hardware abstraction layer etc. Like UNIX (as a matter of fact, NT can run a POSIX system: even NT ACLs have an eerie similarity to the draft POSIX ACLs).
That so-called UNIX vendors failed to market it is one thing; that it failed is another. For one thing, most websites run on a UNIX or another. For another, OS X is a UNIX-like OS with a graphics layer that is not based on X11 - because remember, UNIX is not a graphical OS.
But here, this is hardly relevant: this coalition intends to make a better experience for GNU/Linux (yes, I do mean the whole OS, not the kernel alone) on ARM systems. The problems:
- the kernel isn't yet very optimized for SoC of the ARM type: eventhough Torvalds worked for Transmeta at one time, that part of the kernel still got less love than the x86, and would benefit a little from further development and testing.
- the rest of the OS (starting with the libc library) is little or not at all optimized to make use of advanced ARM instructions: glibc, for instance, sucks on ARM (forks were made - it would be nice to have one and be done)
- X11 has gotten modular, and can thus be kept, however, the multiple input driver is still stuck at the design stage, and it would be nice to have a unified one
- due to X11's lack of MI, toolkits (gtk+, Qt, etc.) don't really have much developed to make use of these technologies
So it's great to see big players working to make GNU/Linux more portable-friendly (and not merely more portable).