still copyright infringements. remember how Kol got slapped with a cease and desist from MS when he did the much favored "Royale" xp msstyle? it was way to much like XPMC's style.
hope the Chinese pirate get there asses reamed just for being stupid.
and no, i am not prejudiced. oh, wait, i am. prejudiced against pirates.
Personally, once MS stops offering update support for XP then it shouldn't matter about this. I hear what you're saying though and until MS drops XP support fully they should probably change the GUI on this.
So, how about this scenario. Say you, three years ago, did a UI design that took you a while to do. So three years have passed, and you still use the same UI design, and you infact make money off of it. The one day, some one does a dlatant rip-off, or a direct copy of your design. your gonna get pissed like all hell that thay are stealing pretty much that month of your life it took to design that UI, along with whatever profit you were making form it has just AT LEAST been halved.
You would wanna kill a pirate also. MS does still offer support for XP Embedded (aka Slim) that powers some standalon machines. Say, like the scan for yourself express lanes at wal-mart. I know from first hand that the OS running those machines IS XP. So MS still makes money off of it. and these guys are doing copyright infringement.