During the opening night of the Wall Street Journal’s D6 conference in California, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer felt it was time to finally shed some light on Vista’s successor that everyone’s been speculating so much about ever since Vista came out.

Anyway, almost one-year-and-a-half and 150 millions Vistas later, Microsoft offered a glimpse at the next generation of OS, simply called Windows 7. And when we say “glimpse,” we really mean it, as Microsoft was more into explaining potential uses of the touch technology than into giving specific details on Windows 7.

Why touch technology? Because Windows 7 will be based on just that, giving users the ability to literally get in touch with their computers. Microsoft is currently trying to incorporate the Surface technology into standard desktop and laptop computers.

We can expect some major changes in our operating system sometime in 2009 or 2010, when Windows 7 is expected to make its debut, but one thing is for sure: there will not be a new kind of kernel, but rather an improvement of Vista’s.